Perhumid Forests of SE Alaska and SW BC

The perhumid region of North America is one of the world’ss largest and most important stores of aboveground carbon and contains large areas of intact old growth forests. However, this region also lacks spatial data quantifying forest structural attributes. Leveraging the detailed forest plot data from the national forest inventories of both the US and British Columbia with the use of remote sensing tools such as Google Earth Engine and Landtrendr, gradient nearest neighbor (GNN) imputation was used to estimate wall-to-wall forest conditions across 29.9 million hectares of temperate and boreal forests at a high spatial resolution.

Click here for project results and cool maps of current forest conditions.

We used LANDIS-II, a spatially-explicit, processed-based model, to simulate forest succession, windstorms, and forest management under three climate change scenarios at a high spatial resolution (90m). To simulate windthrow from regional cyclonic storms, the main driver of natural disturbance in coastal B.C. and southeast AK, we are modifying a newly-implemented wind model as an extension to LANDIS-II. This extension generates storms that lead to mortality at a site depending on species-specific windthrow probabilities and can be calibrated with annual storm frequencies, landfall windspeeds, and storm direction.

Click here for project results and cool maps of future forest conditions.

James Lamping (PhD student) and Melissa Lucash

Funded by the National Science Foundation, 2022- present