Download

Download Full Text (2.6 MB)

Description

Considerable interest and effort in identifying significant wildfire risk is drawn from the catastrophic impact of increasingly large and destructive wildfires on people, their health and safety, and the values and developments that support them. Improved methods include updated efforts to represent hazard and exposure across landscapes and within communities. The tools and techniques applied and evaluated here are collectively called Wildfire Exposure Assessment, a process developed and published by Jennifer L. Beverly (University of Alberta) and others. The simplicity and speed of the Exposure Assessment method make it an important prospect for communities planning for the protection of their citizenry and the values that support them. It makes few assumptions about factors difficult to assert and quantify over planning time horizons. Applied here specifically for communities in the Boreal biome, its utility is evaluated for three communities: Anchorage and Fairbanks in Alaska, and Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. Further, it has been applied to all lands for both Alaska and the Yukon Territory based on vegetation classification from 2014. To this day, all spatial depictions of wildfire hazard begin as vegetation maps. The NASA Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), among its many environmental assessments, produced a consistent, historical catalog of vegetation and land cover classifications over the life of the LANDSAT period of record, dating to 1984. These provided a consistent and useful set of products for use in establishing the spatial distribution of wildfire hazards and the utility these datasets could provide for the three boreal communities considered.

Publication Date

4-13-2024

Keywords

Wildfire, Alaska, Natural Hazard, Mapping, Boreal

Handle

http://hdl.handle.net/11122/15287

Mapping the wildfire threat to boreal communities

Share

COinS