Lidar (terrestrial or bathymetric)

This project builds upon wildland fire remote sensing research by addressing novel questions through the analysis of pre-fire and post-fire light detection and ranging (lidar) data and fusion with optical remote sensing.

LANDFIRE’s mission is to provide agency leaders and managers with a common “all-lands” dataset (including maps) of vegetation and wildland fire/fuels information for strategic fire and resource management planning and analysis.

Burn severity mapping is commonly informed by changes in vegetation spectral response; the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program, for instance, relies on pre- and post-fire Landsat image pairs to delineate and characterize fire severity.

The USGS Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center (UMESC) participated in a small subsection of a larger scope of work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) led by staff at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the USGS Upper Midwest Water Science Center.

Although extensive work has been devoted to understanding the role of fire in maintaining ecosystem functions in upland systems, little research has focused on understanding the impact of fire on coastal wetlands or the response of birds to fire in high marsh wetlands.

Barrier islands, headlands, and coastal shorelines provide numerous valuable ecosystem goods and services, including storm protection and erosion control for the mainland, habitat for fish and wildlife, salinity regulation in estuaries, carbon sequestration in marshes, and areas for recreation and tourism. These coastal features are dynamic environments because of their position at the land-sea interface.

Continuous data on vegetation cover, height, and relative density are increasingly sought as useful metrics for determining animal habitat conditions across large areas. Airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) multi-return information provides a ready source of remotely sensed data that can directly estimate vegetation height and cover at appropriate spatial scales. The U.S.

Although the International Union on Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the Egyptian tortoise (Testudo Kleinmanni) as critically endangered, it is the least studied tortoise species in the Mediterranean basin.

National Wildlife Refuges (NWR) in Texas and Oklahoma manage forested habitats to support priority bird populations in the West Gulf Coastal Plain and Ouachitas Bird Conservation Regions. Airborne laser altimetry or light detection and ranging (lidar) can capture details of forest structure that determine bird species diversity, densities, and distributions.

The BLM’s National Operations Center (NOC) frequently assists field offices with production verification at mine sites across the West, but these analyses are often limited by a lack of historical data.