Modified items

All recently modified items, latest first.

Coastal and Adjacent Data Layers from Designing Sustainable Landscapes in the Northeast: Presentation Hurricane Sandy Tidal Marsh Resiliency Partner Meeting December, 2014

Chesapeake Bay Brook Trout Assessment: To effectively manage vital freshwater resources across large geographic areas, resource managers need the capacity to assess the status of aquatic species, their habitats, and the threats they face. This on-line decision support tool provides that capability for Eastern brook trout across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The tool allows users to characterize current and and potential future aquatic conditions, target and prescribe restoration and conservation actions, set strategic priorities, evaluate management efforts, and support science-based sustainable management plans on behalf of brook trout and associated species. The tool is accompanied by a user-friendly summary report and a technical report providing details on how the tool was created.

Regional Fire Mapping: Regional fire maps generally offer improved resolution over national products and can provide a variety of information such as fire history, fire type, topography, fuels/habitat condition, and more. In the Southern region, the "SE FireMap" is an exciting new project under development - intended to serve as a cohesive system to track both prescribed fire and wildfire activity on public and private lands.

Land managers learn about duff moisture: Land managers learn about duff moisture during a wildland fire workshop in North Carolina. Credit: Jennifer Fawcett

Torres, michael

Smith, Trent

GREENE, MATT

Nordman, Carl

Raccoon Creek Stream Restoration for Imperiled Aquatic Species in lower Etowah River Drainage: This project restored stream areas of Raccoon Creek for imperiled aquatic species in lower Etowah River drainage, Georgia. This project has resulted in several new partnerships, including a collaborative planning workshop for Paulding County held by SARP and the Southeast Watershed Forum. (Photo: Map of Raccoon Creek Watershed)

Beach and Tidal Habitat Inventories: This collection of reports, databases, and data layers offers a birds-eye view of sandy beach and tidal inlet habitats within the U.S. Atlantic Coast breeding range of the endangered piping plover based on imagery from Google Earth, Google Maps, state agencies, municipalities, and private organizations. By comparing the location, status, and condition of potential plover breeding grounds from Maine to North Carolina during three distinct time periods -- before Hurricane Sandy, immediately after the storm, and three years after post-storm recovery efforts -- these inventories provide a habitat baseline that can help resource managers plan for future change.

Prescribed Burning Multimedia: We'll be storing images and non-training videos here to be shared. Any content posted here is free from copyright infringement concerns and can be shared for educational or other purposes including to create brochures, slide presentations, webinars, etc. Training videos can be found under the Training tab on Wildland Fire.

Prescribed Burning Multimedia

General Scoping Recommendations/Discussion

Re: General Scoping Recommendations/Discussion: Although I couldn't attend the meeting, I did watch the entirety of the presentation. I wanted to thank Joe and Eli for such a great presentation! I also wanted to provide some more questions that I have after watching the presentation and the follow-up question/answer session: 1) Would it be helpful to start classifying the fire detections by the ecosystem type in which they encompass? If you're doing the entire SE, you could consider using LANDFIRE or NLCD. Ultimately you would want to decide how narrowly that you want to subdivide vegetation into categories. If you're just interested in doing this for Florida, you could consider FNAI. The reason that I make this suggestion, is because you'll probably find that some vegetation types are accurately defined by remote products (e.g. BA), while others are not. In my experience, the upland vegetation types are generally easier to map fire than the wetlands. Inherent problems with changes in water levels affect remote sensing products. 2) I think that it might make sense to subdivide the area of interests by equally sized grids or property boundaries to determine where the remote sensing products work and where they don't. I really liked Todd's suggestion about considering managed areas like TTRS as units in which you could then monitor for fire activity. 3) If it's determined that some kind of burn severity products are required as part of the output, you should consider converting differenced Normalized Burned Ratio (dNBR) products to Composite Burn Index. CBI data was been compiled for the conterminous U.S. and Sean Parks has subsequently created a Google Earth Engine workflow to use Random Forest to calculate CBI (see https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/10/6/879/htm). Additionally I have been developing regression equations based on different scales/vegetation products that could be used. These equations could be implemented in GEE as well and I have already implemented them to convert MTBS dNBR products to CBI. 4) The "scale" of the project really needs to be taken into account. What is the minimum mapping unit? At what scale is accuracy assessed? All of the remote sensing products that are being assessed inherently have different scales at which they're accurate. Product scale and accuracy need to be taken into account for the scoping of this project. 5) At some point in the scoping it might be nice to determine what the options are for processing and subsequently serving data. Admittedly, these would just be suggestions. Whoever ends up subsequently doing the work would decide how to proceed. At least there would be some already researched options available. 6) Could past fire perimeters somehow be used to help map future? Many areas in the Southeast are burned in specific burn units on a specific time interval (e.g. 2 years). If we use a product like the BA product to intersect where areas burn over a specific amount of time, it might be possible to estimate where these burns typically occur and on what interval. You could then "forecast" where burns will likely happen. These forecasts could be potentially tied to specific burn permits so you know essentially "who burns where". 7) What steps could be taken to get private landowners "buy in" for potentially participating in the tracking of burned areas? Maybe it's framed like "if we monitor burned areas we can help determine where hazards might exist for your property". Or, it could be framed as "we produce these products that can help you with your management of your lands". Some landowners will likely have potential issues with being monitored. But, if you can frame it as "we're giving you something that you can use to better manage your lands" it might help. 8) At the end of the day the data "products" that could be produced should be examined. Depending on your audience, you'll want to range between simple (e.g. summaries, pdfs, kmzs) and actual geospatial data products. If these products are planned well for different users, you might get more buy-in from private land-owners. I really think that TTRS is positioned well to be able to "sell" the idea of how this work can lead to better management outcomes, while maintaining landowner privacy.

General Scoping Recommendations/Discussion

Re: General Scoping Recommendations/Discussion: Although I couldn't attend the meeting, I did watch the entirety of the presentation. I wanted to thank Joe and Eli for such a great presentation! I also wanted to provide some more questions that I have after watching the presentation and the follow-up question/answer session: 1) Would it be helpful to start classifying the fire detections by the ecosystem type in which they encompass? If you're doing the entire SE, you could consider using LANDFIRE or NLCD. Ultimately you would want to decide how narrowly that you want to subdivide vegetation into categories. If you're just interested in doing this for Florida, you could consider FNAI. The reason that I make this suggestion, is because you'll probably find that some vegetation types are accurately defined by remote products (e.g. BA), while others are not. In my experience, the upland vegetation types are generally easier to map fire than the wetlands. Inherent problems with changes in water levels affect remote sensing products. 2) I think that it might make sense to subdivide the area of interests by equally sized grids or property boundaries to determine where the remote sensing products work and where they don't. I really liked Todd's suggestion about considering managed areas like TTRS as units in which you could then monitor for fire activity. 3) If it's determined that some kind of burn severity products are required as part of the output, you should consider converting differenced Normalized Burned Ratio (dNBR) products to Composite Burn Index. CBI data was been compiled for the conterminous U.S. and Sean Parks has subsequently created a Google Earth Engine workflow to use Random Forest to calculate CBI (see https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/10/6/879/htm). Additionally I have been developing regression equations based on different scales/vegetation products that could be used. These equations could be implemented in GEE as well and I have already implemented them to convert MTBS dNBR products to CBI. 4) The "scale" of the project really needs to be taken into account. What is the minimum mapping unit? At what scale is accuracy assessed? All of the remote sensing products that are being assessed inherently have different scales at which they're accurate. Product scale and accuracy need to be taken into account for the scoping of this project. 5) At some point in the scoping it might be nice to determine what the options are for processing and subsequently serving data. Admittedly, these would just be suggestions. Whoever ends up subsequently doing the work would decide how to proceed. At least there would be some already researched options available. 6) Could past fire perimeters somehow be used to help map future? Many areas in the Southeast are burned in specific burn units on a specific time interval (e.g. 2 years). If we use a product like the BA product to intersect where areas burn over a specific amount of time, it might be possible to estimate where these burns typically occur and on what interval. You could then "forecast" where burns will likely happen. These forecasts could be potentially tied to specific burn permits so you know essentially "who burns where". 7) What steps could be taken to get private landowners "buy in" for potentially participating in the tracking of burned areas? Maybe it's framed like "if we monitor burned areas we can help determine where hazards might exist for your property". Or, it could be framed as "we produce these products that can help you with your management of your lands". Some landowners will likely have potential issues with being monitored. But, if you can frame it as "we're giving you something that you can use to better manage your lands" it might help. 8) At the end of the day the data "products" that could be produced should be examined. Depending on your audience, you'll want to range between simple (e.g. summaries, pdfs, kmzs) and actual geospatial data products. If these products are planned well for different users, you might get more buy-in from private land-owners. I really think that TTRS is positioned well to be able to "sell" the idea of how this work can lead to better management outcomes, while maintaining landowner privacy.

USDA Launches Strategy to Continue Conserving the Gopher Tortoise and its Critical Habitat: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has released its new 5-year plan to conserve the Southeast’s threatened gopher tortoise by focusing on the conservation and restoration of its key habitat, the longleaf pine forests. Acting NRCS Chief Kevin Norton told Southeast AgNet the fate of the gopher tortoise is linked to habitat quality, and efforts to conserve habitat on private lands will be critical to its continued survival.

Scientists Uncover Secret In Centuries-Old Mud, Drawing A New Way To Save Polluted Rivers: A pair of east coast scientists met and fell in love over an interest in researching mud, years before producing a paper that would change how the Eastern United States conducts river restoration.