Abstract:
It is well known that healthy forest stands play a vital role in the water cycle. In particular, forested lands help to regulate runoff and snowmelt as well as to increase downstream surface water quality. Forests also help to both increase groundwater quantity and improve groundwater quality. Riparian forests help to support aquatic animals (e.g., cutthroat trout) by providing crucial shaded habitats and essential structure from their debris and root systems. Further, healthy forest ecosystems are widely known to have an increased resiliency to wildland fires. The severity of a wildland fire is typically lower in a healthy forest and this reduced burn severity plays a key role in decreasing both tree and forest stand mortality rates. This increased resiliency of healthy forests to wildland fires has a direct effect on reducing detrimental post-fire water quality impacts (short term and long term) on the important surface water resources in Wyoming. It is necessary to understand the make-up of the forested lands in Wyoming so that they may be best managed in order to provide these much-needed services. This proposal seeks to quantify important forest metrics at an unprecedented spatial resolution of 50-100 cm for all the forested lands in the State of Wyoming so that our land managers can better enact management decisions to have a lasting positive impact on the state’s water resources. This work will leverage the 150,000+ forested USGS 3DEP lidar tiles over the entire state along with innovative high-performance computing workflows to quantify novel forest metrics. In particular, for each USGS 3DEP tile containing forested land in Wyoming we propose to quantify: 1) biomass for every vertical meter of forest at 50-100 cm pixel sizes (can be aggregated to derive forest floor, ladder fuel loads, etc), 2) total tree counts, 3) standing dead tree counts, 4) leaning/snagged dead tree counts, and 5) fallen tree counts. Data processing will occur on the Medicine Bow High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster at the University of Wyoming. The above metrics will be aggregated in such a way as to provide the most benefit to our partners at the Wyoming State Forestry Division (WSFD). That said, we will work directly with the WSFD and other allied state agencies to develop and finetune these metrics so that they will have the greatest benefit to the state. We will use the abovementioned forest metrics to determine which Wyoming watersheds are more susceptible to high severity wildland fire events. The outputs from this project will directly inform forest planning and land management decisions within our state. We will work with the WSFD Geographic Information System (GIS) Program Director to ensure the data outputs from this proposed work will be immediately and easily utilized by the WSFD. We will provide all of the data outputs from this proposed work in the requested data formats to the WSFD in order to provide the most impact for the state. This proposed work is not duplicated in any recent or ongoing projects within the Water Research Program. Lastly, this proposal seeks to support water related training and education in Wyoming by directly funding two graduate students as well as multiple lab/field technicians.
