Accurate tracking of forest activity key to multi-jurisdictional management goals: A case study in California

Clarke A Knight; Ryan E Tompkins; Jonathan A Wang; Robert York; Michael L Goulden; John J Battles

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114083

Accurate tracking of forest activity key to multi-jurisdictional management goals: A case study in California

J Environ Manage. 2022 Jan 15;302(Pt B):114083. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114083. Epub 2021 Nov 17.

Authors

Clarke A Knight¹, Ryan E Tompkins², Jonathan A Wang³, Robert York⁴, Michael L Goulden³, John J Battles⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA; California Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA. Electronic address: clarke.knight@berkeley.edu.
² University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension, CA, 95971, USA.
³ California Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA; Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA.
⁴ Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA; University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension, CA, 95971, USA.
⁵ Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA; California Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA.

PMID: 34800763
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114083

Abstract

An essential component of sustainable forest management is accurate monitoring of forest activities. Although monitoring efforts have generally increased for many forests throughout the world, in practice, effective monitoring is complex. Determining the magnitude and location of progress towards sustainability targets can be challenging due to diverse forest operations across multiple jurisdictions, the lack of data standardization, and discrepancies between field inspections and remotely-sensed records. In this work, we used California as a multijurisdictional case study to explore these problems and develop an approach that broadly informs forest monitoring strategies. The State of California recently entered into a shared stewardship agreement with the US Forest Service (USFS) and set a goal to jointly treat one million acres of forest and rangeland annually by 2025. Currently, however, federal and state forest management datasets are disjoint. This work addresses three barriers stymying the use of federal and state archival records to assess management goals. These barriers are: 1) current databases from different jurisdictions have not been combined due to their distinct data collection processes and internal structures; 2) datasets have not been comprehensively analyzed, despite the need to understand the extent of previous treatments as well as the rate of current activity; and 3) the spatial accuracy of archival datasets has not been evaluated against remotely-sensed data. To reduce these barriers, we first aggregated existing archival forest management records between 1984 and 2019 from the USFS' Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS) and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) using a qualitative scalar of treatment intensity. Combined FACTS and CAL FIRE completed footprint acres - defined as unique areas of land where a treatment was completed at any time since 1984 - have decreased since a peak in 2008. At most, 300,000 footprint acres are completed each year, 30% of the million-acre goal. Prescribed fires - defined as direct burning operations - have risen over time, according to the FACTS hazardous fuels dataset but prescribed fire records in CAL FIRE's dataset have rapidly increased since 2016. We also refined the spatial and temporal detail of the aggregated management record using the Continuous Change Detection and Classification algorithm on satellite remote sensing data to produce a state-wide time series map of harvest disturbances. A comparison of the algorithm's refined data to the archival record potentially suggests over-reporting in both FACTS and CAL FIRE's archival datasets. Our integrated dataset provides a better assessment of current treatments and the path towards the 1-million-acre a year goal. The refined dataset leverages the strengths of complementary, albeit imperfect, monitoring strategies from archives and remotely-sensed detection.

Keywords: Archival data; Forest management; Remote sensing; Silviculture treatments.

Published by Elsevier Ltd.

MeSH terms

California
Forestry*