New Technique Maps Large-scale Impacts of Fire-induced Permafrost Thaw in Alaska

For the first time, researchers have developed a machine learning-based ensemble approach to quantify fire-induced thaw settlement across the entire Tanana Flats in Alaska, which encompasses more than 3 million acres. They linked airborne repeat lidar data to time-series Landsat products (satellite images) to delineate thaw settlement patterns across six large fires that have occurred since 2000. The six fires resulted in a loss of nearly 99,000 acres of evergreen forest from 2000 to 2014 among nearly 155,000 acres of fire-influenced forests with varying degrees of burn severity. This novel approach helped to explain about 65 percent of the variance in lidar-detected elevation change.

FAU Lands $736,000 from NASA to Study the Coastal Carbon Budget from Space

If successful, this research in the Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxia region off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana may demonstrate not just the ability, but also the utility, of remote sensing as an observational technique for characterizing potentially critical but often neglected carbon cycle processes related to marine sediments. Researchers will use satellite images, hydrodynamic modeling and field work in seeking a better understanding of the ocean’s role in the Earth system.