Nate Benson

National Park Service | NPS · Department of Interior

Background The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program has been providing the fire science community with large fire perimeter and burn severity data for the past 14 years. As of October 2019, 22 969 fires have been mapped by the MTBS program and are available on the MTBS website ( https://www.mtbs.gov ). These data have been widely used...

These data were collected between 1996 and 2018 to represent the on the ground burn severity as estimated by the Composite Burn Index (CBI). These data can be regressed against satellite estimates of burn severity (e.g. Landsat Normalized Burn Ratio) to develop regression equations.

These data provide on the ground estimates of burn severity as estimated by the Composite Burn Index (CBI). Data were collected between 1996 and 2018 for fires that burned during this time period. Landsat imagery was used to develop regression relationships between the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and differenced NBR (dNBR). https://www.sciencebase....

Burn Severity Maps, or differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) maps, categorize burned areas (soils and vegetation) into 4 levels: high, moderate, low, and unburned. These maps can be used to rapidly assess wildfire impacts across large, inaccessible landscapes, and also to support assessment of immediate impacts to soils, or short- to long-term i...

Ensemble species distribution models combine the strengths of several species environmental matching models, while minimizing the weakness of any one model. Ensemble models may be particularly useful in risk analysis of recently arrived, harmful invasive species because species may not yet have spread to all suitable habitats, leaving species-envir...

Phenology is the study of recurring life-cycle events, classic examples being the flowering of plants and animal migration. Phenological responses are increasingly relevant for addressing applied environmental issues. This talk will describe some recent advances in landscape-scale phenology estimates from satellite data and their application to hab...

A new monitoring tool called FFI (FEAT/FIREMON Integrated) has been developed to assist managers with collection, storage and analysis of ecological information. The tool was developed through the complementary integration of two fire effects monitoring systems commonly used in the United States: FIREMON (Lutes 2006) and the Fire Ecology Assessment...

The USGS and NASA, in conjunction with Colorado State University, George Mason University and other partners, have developed the Invasive Species Forecasting System (ISFS), a flexible tool that capitalizes on NASA's remote sensing resource to produce dynamic habitat maps of invasive terrestrial plant species across the United States. In 2006 ISFS w...

OVERVIEW This project sought to evaluate the performance of two indices of burn severity, one a remote sensing index called the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) based on 30-meter Landsat data, and the other a field plot-based measure called the Composite Burn Index or CBI (Key and Benson 2006). The evaluation intended to cover the prominent...

Space and airborne sensors have been used to map area burned, assess characteristics of active fires, and characterize post-fire ecological effects. Confusion about fire intensity, fire severity, burn severity, and related terms can result in the potential misuse of the inferred information by land managers and remote sensing practitioners who requ...

________________________________________________________ Monitoring and inventory to assess the effects of wildland fire is critical for 1) documenting fire effects, 2) assessing ecosystem damage and benefit, 3) evaluating the success or failure of a burn, and 4) appraising the potential for future treatments. However, monitoring fire effects is of...

Monitoring and inventory to assess the effects of wildland fire is critical for 1) documenting fire effects, 2) assessing ecosystem damage and benefit, 3) evaluating the success or failure of a burn, and 4) appraising the potential for future treatments. However, monitoring fire effects is often difficult because data collection requires abundant f...

Landscape Assessment primarily addresses the need to identify and quantify fire effects over large areas, at times involving many burns. In contrast to individual case studies, the ability to compare results is emphasized along with the capacity to aggregate information across broad regions and over time. Results show the spatial heterogeneity of b...