Over the past month a wildfire in High Park in Northern Colorado burned over 35,000 ha and was defined as a worst-case scenario fire due to the extent, severity, and duration of the fire. This RAPID award will provide funds to document the impact of the High Park fire on the forests, soils and geomorphology of the burned area. A targeted field campaign to collect baseline information on forest composition, structure and three-dimensional distribution, soil biota, and rates of erosion and sedimentation will be coordinated with remote sensing data acquisition using NEON's Airborne Observatory (AOP) remotely sensed data (visible-to-shortwave infrared imaging spectrometer, small footprint waveform lidar, and high resolution digital camera) over the area disturbed by the fire and adjacent unburned areas. This is an unprecedented opportunity to use this new research tool to quantify an ecological episodic event of this magnitude. Because this is a rapid response proposal, the focus is on essential data collection to characterize post-fire conditions, but data collection efforts are designed in the context of two broad categories of science questions for future research: 1. How did conditions prior to the fire affect fire behavior and impacts? and 2. How does fire severity and pattern affect post-fire trajectories? This RAPID award provides funds to gather data in response to this natural disaster; its urgency derives from the high probability that conditions on the ground will change rapidly after the fire. Summer rains will initiate post-fire erosion and sedimentation; management activities will alter the landscape characteristics, and vegetation will begin to regenerate. The intellectual merit derives from both the science questions but also the ability gather topographic, geomorphic, biological, and chemical information on unprecedented scales (cm to km) with the AOP. Combining the field and remote sensing datasets will allow an unprecedented assessment of the impact of the fire, provide data products useful to the scientific and management communities, and support future research on post-fire trajectories. Findings from this research will be of significant interest to multiple stakeholders in the region, including the US and State Forest Service and the Cities of Fort Collins and Greeley, who both have water supplies that will be affected by post-fire erosion. A workshop will be held to coordinate research results with stakeholders and transfer data products and knowledge gained in addressing complex feedbacks between drought, fire, and water supply.
We sought to document the state of the landscape at the conclusion of the High Park Fire, both within the fire’s final boundary and in reference areas outside the fire. We emphasized documenting those states that change rapidly and must be described as soon as possible. These include forest structure (size and number of dead and living stems; snags), remaining areas of beetle-infestation and beetle-kill, burn severity, invasive species distribution, rates and spatial pattern of erosion and sedimentation, and basic soil physical and biological properties. Under this funding we sampled 110 forest inventory plots and collected soil samples which have been stored for future analyses of soil community composition, soil chemistry and vascular seed bank composition. In two primary study watersheds draining to the Cache la Poudre River we installed and collected sediment from 22 sediment fences, measured site characteristics and channel head locations upslope of the sediment fences, installed 8 rain gauges, and measured both channel cross-sections and longitudinal profiles to provide an initial characterization of post-fire incision, deposition and channel evolution. The NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) was flown over the study area to capture the post-fire topography, forest structure and spectral characteristics of the study area and adjacent areas.
