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Mapping the Distribution of Wildfire Fuels Using AVIRIS in the Santa Monica MountainsCatastrophic wildfires, such as the 1990 Painted Cave Fire in Santa Barbara or Oakland fire of 1991, attest to the destructive potential of fire in the wildland/urban interface. For example, during the Painted Cave Fire, 673 structures were consumed over a period of only six hours at an estimated cost of 250 million dollars (Gomes et al., 1993). One of the primary sources of fuels is chaparral, which consists of plant species that are adapted to frequent fires and may actually promote its ignition and spread of through volatile organic compounds in foliage. As one of the most widely distributed plant communities in Southern California, and one of the most common vegetation types along the wildland urban interface, chaparral represents one of the greatest sources of wildfire hazard in the region. An ongoing NASA funded research project was initiated in 1994 to study the potential of AVIRIS for mapping wildfire fuel properties in Southern California chaparral. The project was initiated in the Santa Monica Mountains, an east-west trending range in western Los Angeles County that has experienced extremely high fire frequencies over the past 70 years. The Santa Monica Mountains were selected because they exemplify many of the problems facing the southwest, forming a complex mosaic of land ownership intermixed with a diversity of chaparral age classes and fuel loads. Furthermore, the area has a wide diversity of chaparral community types and a rich background in supporting geographic information including fire history, soils and topography. Recent fires in the Santa Monica Mountains, including several in 1993 and the Calabasas fire of 1996 attest to the active fire regime present in the area. The long term objectives of this project are to improve existing maps of wildland fuel properties in the area, link AVIRIS derived products to fuel models under development for the region, then predict fire hazard through models that simulate fire spread. In this paper, we describe the AVIRIS derived products we are developing to map wildland fuels.
Document ID
20000064568
Acquisition Source
Headquarters
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Roberts, Dar
(California Univ. Santa Barbara, CA United States)
Gardner, M.
(California Univ. Santa Barbara, CA United States)
Regelbrugge, J.
(Forest Service Riverside, CA United States)
Pedreros, D.
(California Univ. Santa Barbara, CA United States)
Ustin, S.
(California Univ. Davis, CA United States)
Date Acquired
August 19, 2013
Publication Date
December 19, 1998
Publication Information
Publication: Summaries of the Seventh JPL Airborne Earth Science Workshop January 12-16, 1998
Volume: 1
Subject Category
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NAG2-1140
CONTRACT_GRANT: NAGW-4626-I
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.
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