Description
Our goal was to improve understanding of the interactions of wildfire and hydrology (including permafrost changes) and the ensuing post-fire successional trajectories in both uplands and peatlands of the Artic-Boreal Zone (ABZ) in a changing climate. Objective 1: Develop algorithms for soil moisture retrieval from the Arctic Boreal Zone using L-band UAVSAR in preparation for NASA’s NISAR mission and investigate the frequency limitations (L-, C- and P-band SAR) in boreal systems. A useful corollary is to gauge the effect of soil moisture changes on estimates of aboveground biomass. Objective 2: Calibrate & validate ecosystem, hydrology and fire effects models (FATES, CLM-HH, and CanFIRE) for lowlands (peatlands) and uplands and to integrate the 2015-2018 remote sensing and field collected data in a geospatial CanFIREmodel.