Scientist-in-Park Interns making great strides in Wildland Fire Science in Alaska

The NPS Alaska Fire Ecology Program invited three Scientist-in-Park (SIP) Interns to experience an Alaskan winter beginning in January 2024 and contribute to new and ongoing wildland fire science efforts. During their 12-week internships, the SIPs contributed greatly to cleaning, compiling, and utilizing existing datasets to produce new applications of forest, fuels, and fire metrics.

One intern greatly improved an existing data flow fuels technicians use to collect monitoring data at fuels treatment sites too small or remote to necessitate a visit by the Fire Effects Monitoring crew. Dubbed “minimum monitoring,” these methods allow pre- and post-treatment tracking of change in forest basal area, shrub, herb, and ground layer cover. This intern’s efforts utilized ArcGIS tools (e.g. Survey123 and ArcGIS Online) to streamline data collection, display, and archiving.

Screenshot of some of the Alaska fire ecology TLS plot scans uploaded to the interagency Interactive Viewer-IntELiMon site.

Sarah Stehn, NPS

A second intern worked with Terrestrial Lidar Scans (TLS) to convert and upload collected point clouds to an interagency processing platform, compile returned metrics, and compare them with measurements taken at Fire Ecology and Fuels plots. There were 166 NPS Alaska fire ecology TLS plot scans uploaded to the interagency Interactive Viewer-IntELiMon site. The TLS scan data and panorama photos the intern uploaded were used for an experimental visual website of the plots. TLS data holds potential for quickly estimating complex forest structure for use in estimating fuels reduction and fire behavior modeling but requires post-processing and analysis not easy to complete within a field season. This work will make future years of data processing more efficient, allowing the library of comparable TLS and field measured data for calibration to grow.

SIP Intern recording data on spruce trees he later studied during a winter SIP internship.

Fleur Nicklen, NPS

The third intern combined, collated, and quality-controlled two large tree ring datasets that included data collected from over 6,000 trees across interior Alaska. The intern then used this data to estimate stand establishment dates and calculate fire return intervals across the burnable portion of three parks in Alaska and extend our understanding of fire history beyond the current century. The intern found significantly earlier spruce establishment dates in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve compared to Yukon-Charley Rivers National Park and Preserve and Denali National Park and Preserve, suggesting longer fire return intervals in Wrangell-St. Elias compared to the other two parks.

These Scientist-in-Park interns brought new and unique perspectives to these existing datasets. Their energy and enthusiasm to apply new tools resulted in improved workflows and a greater capacity to produce results from fire monitoring efforts, which will contribute to our continued knowledge of fire effects on the ecosystems, resulting in more efficient and effective fuels management activities within Alaska’s national parks.