Supervisor
Dr Adam Pellegrini
Brief summary
Climate change is causing wildfires to increase in frequency and severity in temperate and boreal forests. This has resulted in unprecedented changes to forest function and carbon storage. This PhD will leverage remote sensing and fieldwork to understand the consequences of these changes for ecosystem recovery. The fieldwork will be based in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, USA. It will involve field surveys of ‘megafires’ (in Sequoia National Park) to document changes in ecosystem recovery across fires and distance from fire edge, while trying to determine the ecological processes limiting recovery. The remote sensing work will build on projects conducted in the Pellegrini group that will extend the Landsat series up to the most recent survey to quantify trends in fire severity and vegetation recovery. This involves developing ‘big data’ expertise. The project will be split 50:50 computationally- and field-based. The end result will be a better understanding of forest resilience to wildfire.
Project Summary
Climate change is causing wildfires to increase in frequency and severity in temperate and boreal forests. This has resulted in unprecedented changes to forest function and carbon storage. This PhD will leverage remote sensing and fieldwork to understand the consequences of these changes for ecosystem recovery in the Sierra Nevada region in California. Our group has created a time series using the Landsat satellite of burned area, vegetation recovery, and vegetation classification from the 1980s-2020. We have also conducted field surveys to document recovery patterns of the dominant tree species from the edges of severely burned wildfire patches. This PhD will use the existing data analysis pipeline to extract new Landsat data (extended 2020 to 2024), and conduct further ground surveys of recovery of vegetation from different megafires. Field data will be used to evaluate how dispersal data of tree species can explain the ability of forests to recover from wildfires.
What will the successful applicant do?
The fieldwork will be based in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, USA. It will involve field surveys of ‘megafires’ (in Sequoia National Park) to document changes in ecosystem recovery across fires and distance from fire edge, while trying to determine the ecological processes limiting recovery. The remote sensing work will build on projects conducted in the Pellegrini group that will extend the Landsat series up to the most recent survey to quantify trends in fire severity and vegetation recovery.
References
Varga, Kevin, et al. "Megafires in a warming world: what wildfire risk factors led to California’s largest recorded wildfire." Fire 5.1 (2022): 16.
Hislop, Samuel, et al. "Using landsat spectral indices in time-series to assess wildfire disturbance and recovery." Remote sensing 10.3 (2018): 460.