Estimating the influence of field inventory sampling intensity on forest landscape model performance for determining high-severity wildfire risk

Historically, fire has been essential in Southwestern US forests. However, a century of fire-exclusion and changing climate created forests which are more susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfires. Forest managers use a combination of thinning and prescribed burning to reduce forest density to help mitigate the risk of high-severity fires. These treatments are laborious and expensive, therefore optimizing their impact is crucial. Landscape simulation models can be useful in identifying high risk areas and assessing treatment effects, but uncertainties in these models can limit their utility in decision making. In this study we examined underlying uncertainties in the initial vegetation layer by leveraging a previous study from the Santa Fe fireshed and using new inventory plots from 111 stands to interpolate the initial forest conditions. We found that more inventory plots resulted in a different geographic distribution and wider range of the modelled biomass. This changed th..., Initial Communities Data
The initial communities layer is the base vegetation layer that sets the starting conditions for the exchange of carbon, water, energy, species interactions, disturbance effects, and other landscape processes. The initial treatment optimization study in this landscape (Krofcheck et al., 2019) used 68 Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots from within the Santa Fe National Forest that had been inventoried in 2010 or later and had not burned since 2005. Forest types represented by the FIA plots were piñon-juniper, ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Engelman spruce (Picea engelmannii) and limber pine (Pinus flexilis). The latter three were grouped into a general mixed-conifer forest type. The authors then used elevation, transformed aspect using Topographic Radiation Aspect Index, TRASP (Roberts & Cooper, 1989), and a tasseled cap transformation of spectral data from Landsat 8 (available at https://www.usgs.gov/landsat-missions/landsat-8) a..., R, These data are outputs of LADIS-II simulations using the photosynthesis and evapotranspiration (PnET) succession, Dynamic Fuels and Fire, and Biomass Harvest extensions to simulation forest growth and disturbance using a 100m resolution.

We ran 25 simulations for each of 5 different climate models (CCSM, CNRM, FGOALS, GFDL and MIROC5) for a total of 125 replicates,both for the management and no management scenarios. Each simulation lasted 50 years. The objective of the study was to examine the effects of additional plot data on the initial communites layer and the subsequent model outputs. We compared results from this study and Krofcheck et al., 2019 in the no management scenario, and results from this study between the management and no management scenarios.

Files with the word 'new' refer to files from this study derived from an initial communities layer made using Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) + Common Stand Exam (CSE) plots. Files with the word 'old' refer to files from Kro...