The USFS Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) crew before departing Delta Junction by helicopter to sample a remote field plot. Front Row: Katie Rigby, Misha Yatskov, Dan Irvine, Ashley Lehman; 2nd Row: Ken Winterberger, Chad Oukrop, Eric Straley, Seth Ayotte, Brendt Mueller, Michelle Hansen, Warren Childe, Ray Koleser; and 3rd Row: Pilot Josh Toal, Matt O’Driscoll, Warren Childe.
The Alaska G-LiHT Campaign is a partnership between scientists and NASA and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). The design for the research is to link field measurements of forest structure, vegetation composition, and soils with airborne remote sensing data from G-LiHT. At this stage of the mission, the flight planning looks a little like a technicolor version of Pac-Man. Pink lines on the flight GPS units intersect points showing the location of ground measurements. In flight, the goal is to gobble as many of these dots as possible. Sometimes you wonder if the familiar “wocka wocka” noise of the old video game can be heard above the noise of the engine.
G-LiHT flight computer during data acquisition. The swath of lidar data appears green, the flight line pink, and real-time information on ranging distance and laser returns.
NASA and USFS partners have also worked hard to connect G-LiHT flights to other research activities in the valley. Within NASA, overlapping G-LiHT and MABEL flights are planned to characterize ice cover high in the Alaska Range west of Denali and across the Nebesna Glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias. Overlapping coverage is also planned with two hyperspectral missions from USGS (PI Ray Kokaly) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (PI Steve Newman), offering the chance to compare different hyperspectral imaging systems and share ground calibration data.
G-LiHT flights will also cover a range of existing forest inventory plots collected by collaborators at the Department of Defense lands (Dan Rees), National Park Service (Carl Roland, Colin Malone), and the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (Chris Maisch, Doug Hanson). A dense network of flight lines is planned in and around the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest and the Caribou Poker Creek Research Watershed to cover research plots established by scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Jaime Hollingsworth, Glenn Juday, and David McGuire, among others).
Further afield, still more dots on the flight plan represent long-term studies of forest recovery from fire. More than 40 percent of the watershed has burned since 1950, and G-LiHT will sample about 80 percent of large wildfires that have burned over the past 60 years. Record rainfall this summer has kept fire activity in check, but G-LiHT data from 2014 will also provide a benchmark for assessing changes from fires in coming years. Each of these intersecting lines and points represents a new opportunity for collaboration with the Alaska G-LiHT Campaign in 2014.
G-LiHT PI Bruce Cook talks with Tom Douglas (US Army Corps of Engineers) during a tour of the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility before a joint field visit to the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) field sites outside Fairbanks, Alaska.