Monitoring fire effects in the New Jersey Pine Barrens with burn severity indices

• Main Author: Gallagher, Michael R.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: No Publisher Supplied 2017
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7282/t3rr22bk; https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/55470/

Fire effects refer to the range of direct and indirect impacts wildland fire has on the biotic and abiotic components of the environment. Monitoring fire effects is important for quantifying the results of management activities and identifying patterns of success that can help hone management strategy for the future. Unfortunately, fire effects are usually poorly monitored, if at all, because of the large technical expenditure required to accomplish monitoring activities across broad enough spatial scales to accurately capture variability in effects. However, relatively new approaches for deriving burn severity indices from field and multispectral data can accurately detect change in vegetation and soils reduction. Further, a limited number of studies have recently found these data to also be correlated with changes in carbon pools, fuel loads, stand structure, and regeneration patterns, which are relevant for both risk and ecological management. Of the studies presently available, all have been focused in western pyrogenic forests, which provide limited insight to effects in eastern pyrogenic forests, but do suggest the potential for research with an eastern forest focus. I therefore conducted a series of studies using these approaches to quantify burn severity and identify correlations between burn severity and rates of fuel reduction and tree mortality in eastern pitch pine-oak forests of the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve, which have the highest fire frequency and most active fire management agency in the North Atlantic region. I also investigated patterns of burn severity within fire types and timing using burn severity indices. The results presented provide a directly applicable and rapidly deployable method to monitor general fire effects, in a way that can be easily archived for future reference. These results can be incorporated into current burn strategy to maximize the effectiveness of activities intended to reduce fuels and thinning pitch pine stands, and provide a foundation for additional work in determining correlations between burn severity index data and other effects of interest to forest managers. Further, the results of this work suggests that burn severity can be used to predict these rates more accurately than simply knowing if a region burned or not, and identify key differences of fire of differing type and timing.