LANDFIRE application highlight: Hiawatha National Forest Fuels Assessment

[Megan Sebasky]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to highlight a project I am helping out with in the Northeast region using LANDFIRE:

The land ownership of the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan presents an amazing opportunity to manage land at a large scale (see map below).   To make the most of this the Hiawatha National Forest (HNF) is conducting a fuels assessment in order to prioritize restoration activities.  LANDFIRE data has been successfully used for the assessment of many of the fuel types within the forest, but a lack of understanding and data exists for peatlands, which make up much of the forest. Did you know that peatland fires are arguably the most expensive to manage, and one of the least understood?  Several partners are joining in to help address these challenges, and to support the Hiawatha including The Nature Conservancy, Michigan Technological University, and the Michigan Natural Features Inventory. My amazing lab at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is heading out to the HNF this month to collect tree stumps that have seen fire and date these fires to learn about the fire history of the peatlands and the surrounding uplands. See the attached document for a brief on this project and I will provide updates as we learn more. 

[Megan Sebasky]

Hi all,

I wanted to provide an update on this project. My lab at the Wisconsin DNR just completed our first sampling trip for red pine stumps in the western zone of the Hiawatha National Forest. There were red pine stumps almost everywhere we looked, but most were too degraded for us to get a decent cross section sample for tree ring dating. However we searched far and wide and were able to find several adequate sites and collected 126 samples total. Our sample sites were not as close to peatlands as we had hoped, so we are revisiting our methodology, but will still gather very useful data on fire history in the Upper Peninsula. We've got lots of tree ring dating to do now, as well as more pine stump sampling in the eastern zone and potentially more in the western zone. We are also collaborating with Michigan Tech to collect peatland soil cores to detect charcoal from past fires, and we may do age structure sampling within forested peatlands to get at fire history in yet another way.

You can see a web mapping application I created with our input data as well as sample points so far, here: http://tnc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=10b7f14afe964cc2bcd9d6020f9132fe.

   

[Megan Sebasky]

See this press release that came out yesterday on this project!! -> https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/hiawatha/news-events/?cid=FSEPRD563026