Despite the role of wildfire in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function, recent trends are toward large-extent, high-severity wildfires in California. The wildfire research and management communities need better data on forest fuel distributions to better predict wildfire impacts and guide management strategies. We will address this pressing need by conducting a multi-part analysis of large wildfires in California using contemporary information on forest structure measured by NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) space-based lidar.

Through a partnership between Sonoma State's Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Analysis (CIGA) and the CAL FIRE Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technician was hired through a competitive process to assist the agency in creating a variety of planning maps. A high-priority product will be pre-fire attack maps in the tri-county area. Pre-attack maps include base imagery overlaid with spatial information on fire control lines, access, gates, water resources, structures, and known hazards.

Dr. Bentley and Dr. Clark will use new, emergent remote sensing technology (terrestrial laser scanners and unmanned aerial systems, i.e., drones) to acquire detailed measurements of 3-dimensional forest structure in coastal and southern Cascade forests of northern California. These measurements will be used to: 1) rapidly and more accurately estimate aboveground biomass for a range of tree species and 2) estimate crucial fuels parameters to help validate or refine fire probability and behavior models across these diverse forests.

This project's overarching objective is to demonstrate the value of NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar for systematic and timely wildfire severity prediction, and to assess how GEDI-detected structural changes due to wildfire and fuels treatments alter predictions of future wildfire severity in California forests. Our research will provide insights into post-wildfire recovery, forest management strategies to reduce wildfire risk, contemporary fire regimes, and potential fire impacts under extreme wind conditions and in wildland-urban interface areas.

Mapping and monitoring the structure, function, and biodiversity of Earth's ecosystems is one of the most important research objectives for space science this decade, in particular to address the rapid decline of biodiversity under anthropogenic pressure and climate change. To respond to the urgent need of mapping and monitoring biodiversity in a timely manner, the BioSoundSCape project will use a novel, generalizable, and species agnostic approach to retrieve acoustic and plant spectral and structural diversity.

Accurate estimates of forest carbon stock underpin the development of a global carbon market, yet estimates can vary in accuracy and utility. The proposed research will use a space-based laser (NASA's GEDI) to refine biomass estimations for Sequoia sempervirens redwood forests. These forests are of global importance because they represent areas of extremely high biomass (i.e. carbon stocks), and can provide a proof-of-concept approach that can be extended to validate carbon in other high-biomass forests. As contract work, Dr.

Sonoma State University Professor Matthew Clark leads a NASA-funded project to monitor animal biodiversity, with the help of collaborative researchers, students, and volunteers also known as “citizen scientists”.  The project, known as Soundscapes to Landscapes (S2L), relies on remote sensing, which is an important tool for long-term monitoring of biodiversity.  S2L combines bioacoustic data collected by citizen scientists with satellite and environmental data to monitor bird diversity in Sonoma County, California.