#ReburnsAK talks at AGU

Want to know more about our work in Alaska?

Modeling Post-fire Successional Trajectories Under Climate Change in Black Spruce Forests of Interior Alaska. Shelby Weiss, Katherine Hayes, and Melissa Sue Lucash

Effects of spatial heterogeneity on successional trajectories following repeat disturbances in boreal Interior Alaska. Katherine Hayes, and Brian Buma.

Overlapping and interacting fires, a double whammy: Short-interval burns are becoming more frequent across the US West but pace suggests negative feedbacks and spatial patterning. Brian Buma, Katherine Hayes, Shelby Weiss, and Melissa Sue Lucash

Simulating soil carbon pools and fluxes in the boreal forests of Alaska using a new hybrid model of LANDIS-II and DAMM-MCNiP. Melissa Sue Lucash, Jason Vogel, Robert Scheller

Energy and water balances in boreal forest with discontinuous permafrost: Implementation of a physically-based hydrological model at sites with varying disturbance histories. Adrienne Michelle Marshall, Timothy E Link and Melissa Sue Lucash

B13K-2613 Increased fire frequency accelerates soil carbon cycling in a boreal forest
Jason A Shabaga, Rosvel G Bracho, Stephen Hunter Scully and Jason Vogel

Fine-scale Observations of Permafrost After Repeat Fires in Interior Alaska. Kristin Olson, Brian Buma, and Katherine Hayes

Soil Respiration in very High Frequency Boreal wildfires as a Function of Species. Vishnu Kodicherla, Jason A Shabaga,Jason Vogel, Katherine Hayes, and Brian Buma

#ReburnsAK was at AFE in Tucson, AZ

Melissa, Brian, Shelby and Kate co-authored two talks at the AFE (American Fire Ecology) conference in Tucson, Arizona from Nov 18-22, 2019:

Continued repeat burning in the boreal causes continued ecosystem transformation (Hayes, Buma, Lucash, Weiss)

Rates of short-interval fires increasing across the U.S. West (Buma, Hayes, Weiss and Lucash)

Cacti right outside the conference center

Symposium at AFE

Brian Buma, Melissa Lucash and Kate Hayes will be presenting results from our project at the American Fire Ecology Conference in Tucson in Nov, 2019.

https://fireecology.org/

Filming in Alaska with a documentary filmmaker

Our Reburns project met in Fairbanks, Alaska to film videos about our project for our NSF Broader Impacts. We collaborated with Science Live, an organization spearheaded by Peter Erb, documentary filmaker, which connects field-based research with the local community. Science Live will use this footage to create four short videos and curriculum for middle school students about wildfires, climate change and boreal forests.

Peter Erb (right) filming Jason Vogel (left) as he talks about the impacts of repeated burning on soil carbon

Outreach with middle school students in Fairbanks, Alaska

Shelby Weiss, PhD student at Portland State, led a module with the Alaska Summer Research Academy for two weeks in July of 2019 with Kara Kornhauser, PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This module was targeted at middle school students and focused around the theme of boreal forests and wildfires. We had nine students participate in the module and spend the week doing interactive activities and going on field trips to learn about fires, forests and soils in Alaska. Blog post below:

https://www.reburnsak.com/alaska-summer-research-academy

Fieldwork in Alaska

Dr. Brian Buma (University of CO-Denver) and his Ph.D. student Kate Hayes are leading the vegetation fieldwork this summer in Alaska while Drs. Jason Vogel and Jason Shabaga are leading the soil field measurements this summer. Working hard for their data, which they plan to showcase at AGU in Dec 2020. Stay tuned!

AGU Session Proposal Accepted

Our session proposal was accepted to AGU 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks to Kate for leading the effort.

Email lucash@pdx.edu if you’re interested in presenting a talk or poster in our session.

Changes in Disturbance Frequency in High Latitude Ecosystems: Implications for Ecological, Hydrological, and Biogeochemical Processes

Outreach with middle school girls' STEM club

Melissa volunteered at an after-school STEM club for girls at Groner K-8. She assigned them different fire severity classes and then asked them to create a forest that would burn at that severity class. All four groups were successful, the girls had a great time, and we didn’t set off the sprinkler system when our forests burned. An all-around success!