Open Collections

Zhang, Tian Cheng (Tony)

University of British Columbia

Changing fire regimes in western North America poses uncertainties to forest composition and recovery after fire. Little research links post-fire landscape patterns to the ecological role of surviving forest patches, known as fire refugia. I attempted to bridge this knowledge gap by exploring (1) how well spectral mixture analysis (SMA) can map and quantify fire refugia, (2) the linkage between moderate-scale (30m) fire refugia obtained from Landsat imagery and forest recovery, and (3) fire refugia patterns in the Montane Cordillera ecozone from 1985 to 2020. I developed an SMA workflow that effectively mapped fire refugia at a landscape scale but was less effective at quantifying fine-scale fire refugia. I identified fire refugia density as a minor but significant variable in determining forest recovery at a spatial resolution of 30m. I found no significant changes in the proportions of fire refugia within most of the Montane Cordillera ecozone, with the exception of the Interior Cedar-Hemlock region, which showed an increasing fire refugia proportion over a 35-year span. These results support regional fire refugia and burn severity trends in other similar forested regions, suggesting forest resilience to increased fires. My research demonstrated an SMA-based methodology for effectively mapping fire refugia. A better understanding of fire refugia distribution could aid research and managing post-fire forest ecology at a landscape scale.

Text

2024-04-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87799

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/