Forests provide clean air and water, wildlife habitat, ecosystem services and are a renewable resource for many of the products we use daily. The NCASI Foundation supports research to ensure healthier and more productive forests for the betterment of the future. These projects address important technical questions related to sustainable forestry, forest environmental management, and forest health. A vigorous consultative relationship with representatives of landowners, forest products companies, regulatory agencies, academic institutions, and environmental organizations underpins this work.
This project will look at the effects of fire and post-fire management on riparian vegetation, riparian vegetation community structure and its effect on aquatic ecosystems, and vegetation cover or species richness following disturbance with varying distance from the stream.
Defining forested streams, while challenging, is a current focus of research, development of remote sensing tools, and citizen science initiatives. These definitions are a primary determinant of the degree of protection surface waters receive during forest management by determining allocation of buffers and their widths.
Given that fires of the magnitude observed in 2020 are projected to continue to occur across the Western U.S., it is critical to quantify the effects from the current wildfires to enable informed policy and forest and water management decisions in the future.
Wildfires can have severe and lasting impacts on ecological, economic, and social resources. To reduce and mitigate fire severity, managers require information about relative influences of topography, weather, fuels, prior management activities, biophysical setting, human infrastructure, and other variables that influence wildfire occurrence, spread, and severity.
This project is to develop and host an online tool that will estimate and display forest carbon stocks, forest carbon stock changes, and water resources on lands certified under the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) across the conterminous US.