Three Winter Interns Advance Wildland Fire Science in Alaska's National Parks

In January 2024, the NPS Alaska Fire Ecology Program brought three Scientist-in-Park (SIP) interns north for an Alaskan winter. In 12-week internships, they cleaned, compiled and put to new use existing data on forests, fuels and fire.

1. "Minimum monitoring" made easier

Some fuels treatment sites are too small or remote to justify a visit from the Fire Effects Monitoring crew, so fuels technicians record them with simpler "minimum monitoring" methods — tracking changes in forest basal area and in shrub, herb and ground-layer cover before and after treatment. The first intern overhauled that data flow with ArcGIS tools such as Survey123 and ArcGIS Online, streamlining how the data are collected, displayed and archived.

2. Lidar scans of fire plots

The second intern worked with terrestrial lidar scans (TLS): converting point clouds, uploading them to an interagency processing platform, gathering the returned metrics, and comparing them with measurements from Fire Ecology and Fuels plots.

• 166 Alaska fire ecology plot scans went up to the interagency Interactive Viewer–IntELiMon site, and the scans and panorama photos fed an experimental visual website of the plots.
• TLS could quickly estimate complex forest structure for judging fuels reduction and modeling fire behavior — but the processing is hard to finish within a field season. This work makes future processing faster and lets the library of matched lidar and field data, used for calibration, keep growing.

Alaska fire ecology TLS plot scans in the interagency IntELiMon viewer. Sarah Stehn, NPS

3. Fire history from tree rings

The third intern merged and quality-checked two large tree-ring datasets covering more than 6,000 trees across interior Alaska, then used them to estimate when forest stands took root and to calculate fire return intervals across the burnable parts of three parks — reaching back beyond the current century.

The finding: spruce became established significantly earlier in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve than in Yukon-Charley Rivers and Denali national parks and preserves, suggesting longer intervals between fires at Wrangell-St. Elias.

A SIP intern recording data on spruce trees he later studied during his winter internship. Fleur Nicklen, NPS

The payoff

Fresh eyes and new tools gave the program better workflows and more capacity to turn fire monitoring into results — adding to knowledge of fire effects on Alaska's ecosystems and supporting more efficient, effective fuels management in its national parks.

Sources

Based on "Scientist-in-Park Interns making great strides in Wildland Fire Science in Alaska," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.