The Lake Fire: Wildfire's impact on forest regrowth and carbon sinks in the San Bernardino National Forest
Fernando Hernandez • Dr. Hillary Jenkins • Environmental Studies Department
Summary The 2015 Lake Fire that burned over 31,359 acres in the San Bernardino National Forest is one of many examples of the increasingly severe and frequent wildfires that have plagued the Southern California region over the past decades. Forests are a main source of significant global carbon sinks and as such, currently have the uptake potential to sequester carbon from the atmosphere as a possible solution to stabilize global climate change. Recent trends reveal a strong association between anomalous fire weather and extreme fire behavior due to anthropogenic climate change, which creates conditions that shift areas from sinks into carbon sources that are exacerbated within a positive feedback loop, hindering the forest’s ability to fully recover and develop mature trees that can again maximize this sequestration of carbon. This presentation focuses on visualizing a Difference Normalized Burn Ratio of the affected Lake Fire area measuring its severity and visualizing the amount of carbon lost from the fire as an addition to an EVST Honors Capstone paper.
Difference Normalized Burn Ratio
dNBR Value 0.522466 -0.0999385
Extent of all 10 plot points used in this analysis.
Methods
Plot points are located inside of the Lake Fire area and designated as either control or fire plots. Each site is an 18x18 meter square, subdivided into nine squares that measure 6x6 meters each. Every tree is surveyed and their height, diameter at base height, and height is recorded alongside other data which include understory, soil, and canopy cover. For quantifying the losses of biomass and carbon the allometric equations used in this study are provided by the updated framework for generalized biomass equations given by Chojnacky, et al. (2014). For calculating the amount of biomass in kilograms, the DBH recorded centimeters is entered into the allometric equation of e^(-2.6177+2.4638(ln(x))). For calculating the amount of carbon in kilograms, the DBH in centimeters is entered into the allometric equation of e^(-2.6177+2.4638(ln(x)))/2. When it comes to the calculating carbon loss, for every regular data point in the data series, the dBNR average is subtracted and is divided by the standard deviation to preserve the variability of the data.
Percent Carbon Lost
Value 2
y = 5.4044x + 0.311x - 0.0373 dNBR Carbon Loss Max 0.5220 1.5977 Min -0.0999 -0.0144
1.00 0.75 0.50 0.25 0
By relating dNBR to carbon loss. we obtain the equation used to visualize the percent carbon. Printed on 04-05-2022 for the 2022 University of Redlands Spatial Symposium