WHRC conducts research with the Department of Defense

by Connor Murphy

A growing trend of forest mortality and fires in the Arctic has raised concerns from an unconventional ally of climate scientists—the United States military.

As part of a new cooperative project, WHRC scientist Dr. Brendan Rogers will work with the Department of Defense to study climate risks to Alaskan military bases. Rogers says it is a unique opportunity.

“It’s a community that we don’t typically have a lot of interaction with,” Rogers said, “but they definitely understand the science and environmental changes they’re seeing.”

Despite political friction over climate change, the Department of Defense has taken a pragmatic approach to preparing for its effects. A newly released Pentagon report analyzed the vulnerability of critical military facilities to climaterelated events and found more than 60 percent of the sites at risk.

The four-year project will focus on events in the Arctic that are likely to be exacerbated by climate change, such as forest fires, tree mortality, and permafrost thaw. Rogers’ team will combine on-site fieldwork with satellite imagery to create models that project those risks into the future.

In Alaska, the health of forests on military bases are a priority for the DoD because unforeseen landscape changes can disrupt military training and operations. Landscape-level understanding and forecasts of these threats will enable Defense Department land managers to make better-informed decisions and ultimately improve forest health.

Military field exercises can take several months to schedule and plan. With forest fires growing as a threat to operations, the Pentagon hopes management of at-risk areas will improve training timelines. For example, the military is particularly concerned about changes in vegetation flammability, as affected by longer and hotter growing seasons, as this directly impacts the type of training and weapons testing that can occur. Current tools to predict flammability, however, are lacking.

“Another primary concern involves lands that are vulnerable to change in the nearfuture,” Rogers said. “Specifically, we’re helping the DoD to develop operational forecasting models for tree mortality and vegetation changes.”

Rogers says that unlike fires, which kill trees in hours, these mortality events take place over many years. A cycle of droughts and pests, enhanced by a warmer climate, weaken forests for decades before dying in large groups.

“Tree mortality is a big issue in northern forests because of climate change,” Rogers said. “With longer growing seasons and more pests, a lot of boreal forests experienced massive mortality events in the last 15 years.”

From a research perspective, these longer mortality events present an opportunity—longer time scales make them trackable and predictable. Rogers has developed a model that predicts this mortality.

“We found out that we can detect these signals years before death using satellite remote sensing, which gives us a novel method to predict future changes,” Rogers said.

While the analysis will provide a critical scientific underpinning for decisions within the Department of Defense, the project may be useful beyond its goals for the military. Rogers says the models crafted for the Pentagon could help scientists project forest threats outside of Alaska, as well.

“This could apply anywhere,” Rogers said. “We’re looking to expand this to eventually become a global effort.”