Does fire beget fire? Nathan Korinek investigates the relationship between fires and previously burned areas in western US forests
My name is Nathan Korinek, and I am finishing my final year as a master’s student in the Geography department. I’ve been working with the Geography department and ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ’s Earth Lab since 2017. I went from an undergraduate to a research assistant and am now receiving my masters. During my time, I have been working with my amazing advisor, Dr. Jennifer Balch, under an NSF grant focused on compound disturbances (i.e. insect kill, fires, and droughts) in Western US forests. Compound disturbances can have drastic impacts on landscapes and ecosystems, threatening ecosystem changes such as forests dying off or the removal of a species from an ecosystem altogether.
My work for the last few months has studied the effects of compound fires in an area by looking at what happens when a fire burns an area that had been previously burned. Specifically, I was interested in what happens to the fire severity of these reburned areas. Fire severity is a measure for how much change a fire caused in the landscape, ecosystem, and vegetation of a burned area. To quantify this, I used the Composite Burn Index (CBI), which is an on the ground measure of burn severity. CBI data is not widely available and difficult to obtain, so I used a modeled CBI dataset for the Western US developed by Tyler McIntosh at Earth Lab. I combined this with other data sources from FIRED fire boundaries, ERA5 weather data, and more in order to get a complete picture of these reburn events. I found that fires burning in previously burned areas have a lower average severity than fires burning in areas that had not been previously burned.
My thesis work is one small piece of the puzzle when looking at compound disturbances in western US forests. In my time at Earth Lab, I have also contributed to this grant in other ways outside of my thesis. This includes visualizing different disturbances in our study region of the western US, flying drones over burn scars in Colorado in order to help quantify vegetation regrowth, going out into the field and identifying individual plants to label the drone data by plant type, and more. My time at Earth Lab and the Geography department has been filled with amazing colleagues and research opportunities, making it an incredible experience overall. I look forward to continuing my work with Earth Lab this summer!
