Who are we?
Fire severity and carbon emmision
Terminology
Fuel consumption- how much material is consumed during the burn
Burn severity- an ecologically-based term centered on assessment of the impact of fire on the ecology of the site.
This is complex thing because it is so qualitative.
Fire intensity- energy produced
Fire severity- direct effects of fire on the environment
Nancy French’s project:
To quantify the variability in biomass consumption in forested region of northern and western north America.
Remote sensing will be used to sample fire-disturbaed sites at broad spatial scales so that the full range of fires’ impact can be assessed.
Investigate the connection between spectral signature and biomas consumption by comparing field and image data
Ground measurements and remote sensed measurements
Canadian project (Canadian Wildfire Fire Information system Emissions Team-CET):
HAVE to deliver natioan estimates of carbon emissions (KYOTO protocol).. need something right away after a fire to show carbon emissions, so they are using remote sensing.. Remote sensing and the connection between fire emissions and carbon.
Canadian fire modeling: Interpreting “fire severity”. Doing a lot of prescribed burns, and finding out that fuel consumption is really correlated with pre-burn characteristics! CBM-
CFS3 carbon pools. (Mike Apps, and Vernen?). BORFIRE model. FWI parameters and fuels data to calculate physical fire characteristics to get a fire emissions. Very similar to
ALFRESCO, but a bit more detail in pools within trees, but no shrubs.
BORFIRE method- FBO-based rate of fire spread from ISI for crown fuel consumption, duff and wood debris fuel consumption variable by fueld load, all inputs are spatially and temporally explicit.
NASA-NACP (Eric/Dave McGuire/Merritt’s work): “what is that stuff called duff”.
Impacts of fire severity on these deep organic layers (mostly underlain with permafrost).
TEM modeling with Dave. Carbon storage impacts, and carbon emissions. How much is peatlands contributing to carbon emissions related to fire. What controls depth of burn?
Especially in areas where short-term fire weather are not controlling the moisture to the same degree. Quantify landscape, fire weather controls, and other controls on surface fuel consumtion in the N. American boreal pealtnds and permafrosts. Develop approaches to imprive SFC in fire emissions and biogeochemical cyle models, generate trace gas emissions estimtes from boreal fires for the years 1995-2006, determine how recent increase in fire activity in the NABR region have influenced the terrestrial carbon budget

What are the patterns of aboveground burn severity in the different forest/peatland types that burn?
What is the range of depth in burn. Really interested in the variability within each fires.
What factors control interannual and seasonal variability.
Duff moisture: Water table, interannual variability, permafrost, soil drainage, how all these related to duff consumption.
Laura’s SAR project: Can we measure soil moisture in our sites for Laura???
Canadian Forest Service lessons learned regarding the CBI and NBR from Montana and
Canada (Vern) after meeting with Carl Keys:
To imprive estimates of forest floor fuel consumption on large wildfires… to explore methods of using EO to refine carbon emission estimates directly.
CBI-general average burn conditions of stands. It boreal fuel types it ma be correlated with the NBR and may reflect fire severity. CBI answers- has fire altered site biophysical conditions? Provides magnitude of change from pre-fire conditions. May stratify CBI into ordinal classes: L,M. H severity. Area burned by severity class.
Fire severity- reflects fuel consumption which be measured in terms of depth of burn consumed or emitted.
CBI, selecting sites that are homogenous that are 90x90 (based on NBR), range of variation within burn, intended for quick assessment.
How are they going to sample this year? Test CBI versus NBR relationship in boreal fuel types, relationship between fuel consumption and CBI or NBR. They will be in
Yukon and Northwest Territories.
Merritt’s stuff: Fire and peatlands. Yippee!!! Four ways to measure fuel consumption.
Before/after (pins or TH), mass unburned – mass burned (mass loss). TAU looking for a recalcitrant element compared to a element that combusts easily, LOI (Merritt’s method)
Techniques: DfNBR. Wagtendonk et al (2004). B7-loss moisture, B4-loss of vegetation. Essentially testing vegetation – char.
How doest dNBR represent burn severity? (Verbyla, CET-comparison of CBI/dNBR)
How does dNBR represent fuel consumption?(CET-based on soil samples and OM depth measures, Verbyla, graduate student, Ted Schuur?), ESK/MT/NF will do this in AK in
’05 and at ’95, and ’99 sites). Remote sensors think these AREN’T related… but we need to have a couple of papers that SHOW this (so that people will stop telling us to use the CBI all the time.
How does CBI represent burn severity/fuel consumption? (CET- in 04 & 05, based on
OM soil samples and OM depth measures. ESK/Mt?NF will do this in AK in 05 and at
95 and 99, TH/UAF will do this for 2004 burns using TH pre-burn info). Maybe this should be a paper, where we pool all our data to test if there is a relationship between fuel consumption and CBI. Then, if not, what can we create that will help us scale fuel consumption.

What should our basic set of measurements for the 2005 filed season?
Field: CBI-(Alaska modified),ground layer fuel consumption-(before/after [th and pins], mass(ub)-mass [cores processed by horizon?] (b), Tau and LOI (Jen Harden’s
FROSTFIRE paper), depth to min at additional points, Dyrness and Norum,
Remote Sensing: dNBR, active fire mapping for date stamping , fire type
(flaming/smoldering) and fire intensity (FRP), aboveground fuel consumption (ocular assessment, diamter and density of trees), other (OM/Soil moisture)
Summer field plans… Remote sensing tools for determining field sites. Hotspots,
Nancy’s icky fuel’s map, NBR
CBI measurements: Alaska modified (Jennifer Allen), Canadian group using the unchanged CBI. Adding
What are we going to name ourselves? North American Boreal Forest Fire Fuel
Consumption Projects Team (BorCon)
Develop meta data set. present data and results of summer data collections in Jan (in Edmunton) proposals- meta analysis from NSF???
Russians, Doug McRae or S. Conrad, if we get a post-doc perhaps having them focused on synthesis, and possible novel field collection (in Russia?)
Field trip for remote-sensing. Ron, Eric, and Dave Verbyla.
Products:
Journal articles to present combined results of AK and Canadian data and analyses from 2005 data collections….. CBI versus fuel consumption
Proposals:
-Meta analysis for NSF (Merritt and Teresa)
-Coordination of NASA and CCRS (Eric and Tim  )
Development of peet consumption model
Further develop RS collaborations within the group
IBFRA meeting plans
Possible special issues for related pubs