Project Title

Recovery time and succession of burned areas in protected areas

Collaborators

Peter Olsoy (Project Lead), Joel Masselink, Sebastian Essink, Marvin Bensch, Ethan Andrews

The Problem

Sample Data

WA State Protected Area estate:

• Categorized into public and private management
• Protected areas and easements that are > 1 ha
• Source: Combined World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) and National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) in August 2017

Fire perimeters in Washington from 1973-2018

• Includes attributes for fire year, cause of fire, fire name, and agency in charge of land
• Fires from earlier years are very limited, with only a single fire in the 70's, with coverage increasing near the mid-80's
• Source: Washington Geospatial Open Data Portal

Specific Questions

• fire/burned area boundaries
• classify land condition using raster data (NDVI, optical)
• look at succession / regeneration (before and after fire)
• investigate breakdown of protected area estate between public and private, and by state
• what is the connection between protection and fire occurrence and post-fire succession?

Tasks:

• find burned area polygons
• boilerplate Jupyter Notebook to interact with data
• make widget slider to demonstrate differences in NDVI pre- and post-Fire
• map time series of total area burned in Washington, as well as subset to protected areas
• import PA & fire perimeter data into Google Earth Engine
• explore GEE datasets for estimating forest recovery in a single fire perimeter
• generate time series of post-fire recovery in GEE
• calculate average NDVI within a polygon and extract as CSV from GEE
• extend GEE script to entire dataset
• graph average NDVI over time for all burned areas

Proposed Methods/Tools

Use the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to highlight burned areas within large fire perimeter polygons.

Background Reading

Normalized Burn Ratio

Files

• .gitignore
  Globally ignored files by git for the project.
• environment.yml
conda environment description needed to run this project.
• README.md
  Description of the project.

Folders

contributors

Each team member has it's own folder under contributors, where he/she can work on their contribution. Having a dedicated folder for one-self helps to prevent conflicts when merging with master.

data

Test datasets for the project including the protected areas and fire perimeters for Washington State.

notebooks

Notebooks that are considered delivered results for the project should go in here.

scripts

Helper utilities that are shared with the team