CAREER: Fire management effects on Sierra Nevada ecohydrology - a dynamical systems approach

GSTDTAP

项目编号	1555041
	CAREER: Fire management effects on Sierra Nevada ecohydrology - a dynamical systems approach
	Sally Thompson
主持机构	University of California-Berkeley
项目开始年	2016
	2016-06-01
项目结束日期	2021-05-31
资助机构	US-NSF
项目类别	Standard Grant
项目经费	536987(USD)
国家	美国
语种	英语
英文摘要	Forested mountain watersheds supply the majority of water to the western United States, and are fundamentally fire-prone ecosystems. Contemporary drought, and projected future climate change, simultaneously exacerbate fire risks in the Sierra Nevada and threaten the sustainability of the water supply. Management approaches that could simultaneously reduce fire risks while safeguarding water supplies are sorely needed. This research takes advantage of a unique pair of watersheds in the Sierra Nevada where fire suppression was practiced for almost a century prior to the 1970s, and managed wildfire has been practiced since then. These basins will be studied to determine how vegetation cover, snow and soil moisture behavior, and water yields have responded to the changed fire regime. The results will be synthesized in a modeling framework that can be applied to evaluate the potential consequences of similar shifts in fire regime elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada. Results of the research will provide an evidence basis to motivate new fire management in the Sierra Nevada, reducing fire risk and enhancing water security in a region that supplies 60% of California's 38 million residents. These results will be shared through an outreach program developed with the California Fire Science Consortium. The project will also include a citizen-science project involving middle-school students participating in outdoor environmental education programs run by NatureBridge at Yosemite National Park. The removal of fire from forested mountain ecosystems represents a century-long, massive, and poorly-understood experiment, altering the composition, demography, allometry and succession dynamics of forests, with presumed (although largely unquantified) effects on biogeochemistry, hydrology and ecosystem function. This research project leverages a unique opportunity to explore these effects by examining changes in vegetation, fire and hydrology in the only two watersheds in the Sierra Nevada where fire suppression has been deliberately alleviated and the natural fire regime allowed to re-establish. Historical and contemporary aerial photography will be used to reconstruct vegetation histories in the study watersheds. The resulting vegetation maps will be used as a basis for upscaling distributed soil moisture and fuel moisture measurements made throughout the study basins, and as input into distributed hydrological models. Weather stations, snow cameras and soil moisture observations will be installed in sites with distinct post-fire vegetation successions to characterize the effects of vegetation change on local meteorological and hydrological conditions. Laboratory experiments will be undertaken to evaluate the persistence of soil hydrophobicity under repeated freeze-thaw cycles, characteristic of the Sierra Nevada wet season. The process insights obtained through these field observations will be used to develop, parameterize and test a probabilistic model representing the dynamic interactions of fire, vegetation and water. The project will contribute new process understanding about the interaction of fire and hydrology in snow dominated landscapes, specifically how fire history impacts snowpack dynamics (such as interception, sublimation and melt timing), and how freeze-thaw processes impact post-fire soil hydrophobicity. It will generate unique spatial, temporal and historical datasets that will reveal the joint consequences of fire suppression and its alleviation on vegetation and hydrology in montane forests.
来源学科分类	Geosciences - Earth Sciences
文献类型	项目
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/69630
专题	环境与发展全球科技态势
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Sally Thompson.CAREER: Fire management effects on Sierra Nevada ecohydrology - a dynamical systems approach.2016.