The objectives of this rapid response effort are to better inform application science in disaster response, watershed management and land use land cover change analysis so as to provide residents…

This $90,000.00 grant award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center was made to the County of Sonoma, Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District. The objective of this rapid response effort is to better inform application science in disaster response, watershed management, and land use/land cover change analysis to provide residents and local, state, and regional decision makers with critically needed information for fire recovery and future fire management and response in Sonoma County. Key tasks include acquiring high-resolution aerial imagery, analyzing relationships between fire intensity and landscape characteristics, evaluating the usefulness of the Sonoma Veg Map in fire response, and monitoring post-fire vegetation changes. This grant does not have a set-aside designation and is intended to be completed by September 1, 2019.

The objectives of this rapid response effort are to better inform application science in disaster response, watershed management and land use land cover change analysis so as to provide residents and local, state, and regional decision makers with critically needed information for fire recovery and future fire management and response in sonoma county. This effort will be conducted by the sonoma county agricultural preservation and open space district, which currently serves as the manager and access point for geospatial data for much of sonoma county. The core scientific objectives of this effort are to assess burn / no burn areas at a fine scale and update existing landscape maps; measure and discover relationships between fire burn intensity and behavior VIS a VIS landscape characteristics, land use and land management patterns; evaluate the value of the NASA funded sonoma VEG map data in fire response; and closely monitor post-fire changes in vegetation to understand the pattern of recovery across time and space. The first step of this research will be to immediately acquire high-resolution (1 foot) stereo, digital airborne, 4-band (r, g, b, NIR) optical imagery over the areas of the pocket, tubbs, and nuns fires. The imagery will be analyzed against pre-fire imagery to map burn/no burn pixels, validate coarser burn intensity maps created by the forest service, update the existing vegetation databases, and create a phodar derived digital surface model (DSM) for quantifying the biomass lost in the fire through comparisons with the pre-fire DSM. The evaluation of relationships between fire burn intensity and behavior and landscape characteristics and management will begin with measuring the pre-fire landscape characteristics of areas burned by evaluating their vegetation association, carbon, biomass, forest structure, vegetation height, canopy closure, fire history, soil, management practices, building footprints, slope, elevation, and aspect. Second, machine-learning techniques (e.g. random forests) will be employed to determine the landscape variables that are most predictive of fire burn intensity and behavior. The evaluation of the value of sonoma VEG map data in fire response will include a survey and interviews with individuals regarding their use of the sonoma VEG map products in responding to the fires and assessing fire damage. The task of vegetation monitoring will involve the quarterly monitoring and measuring of changes in land cover and land use in burned areas using multi-temporal landsat, sentinel and modis imagery which will be used in conjunction with high-resolution, post-fire imagery acquired first under this grant, and later under county wide imagery acquisitions by sonoma county and by the national agricultural imagery program (naip). Next, cross correlation analysis will be performed on the sonoma vegetation map polygons and attributes against the multi-temporal imagery to monitor change. This effort has the potential to inform fire hazard assessment efforts, affect post-fire recovery planning, and inform emergency response preparation in the decades to come, not only in sonoma county but also in other areas of the world which repeatedly experience catastrophic wildfire events.