Adaptation and Mitigation

We focus on landscape studies of natural and working lands, in particular coastal and inland wetlands and rangelands. We quantify ecosystem benefits, find areas vulnerable to future change, and identify potential for climate mitigation and resilience. We conduct research by scaling field measurements to the regional, state and national scale with remote sensing, geospatial analysis, and modeling...

The Hazards Societal Consequences and Risk Communication project is led by Anne Wein at the Western Geographic Science Center (WGSC). The umbrella project is Science Application for Risk Reduction (SAFRR), which estimates consequences of natural hazard disaster scenarios as a strategy to engage decision-makers in increasing a community’s ability to cope with the effects of a disaster. Scenarios...

The Ecosystem Modelling and Decision Support Project seeks to understand how drivers of ecosystem change like wildfire, drought, and land use affected past spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation communities and wildlife. Research methods involve 1) analyzing field-collected information (e.g. long-term plot/transect data, repeat photography) on soils, vegetation, and/or wildlife with...

The size and number of large wildland fires in the western United States have grown dramatically over the past decade, with a contingent rise in damages and suppression costs. This trend will likely continue with further growth of the wildland urban interface (WUI) into fire prone ecosystems, hazardous fuel conditions from decades of fire suppression, and a potentially increasing effect from...