Assessing the Impacts of Fires on Watershed Health
This advanced-level training will focus on using remote sensing observations for monitoring post-fire impacts on watershed health, building off the ARSET training offered in 2021: Satellite Observations and Tools for Fire Risk, Detection, and Analysis. Specifically, this training will highlight uses of NASA Earth observations (EO) for pre-fire land cover mapping, watershed delineation and stream mapping, post-fire burn severity mapping, and pre- and post-fire riverine and freshwater water quality. This three-part training will highlight case studies that use remote sensing data for assessing the impacts of fires on watersheds. This training will also provide participants with hands-on exercises for using NASA EO for these assessments within the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and Google Earth Engine.
Relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals:
- Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
- Target 6.6: By 2030, protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers and lakes
- Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
- Target 11.5: By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations
- Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
- Target 15.3: By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world
Course Dates: July 6, 11, & 13, 2023
Times: 11:00-12:30 or 15:00-16:30 EDT (UTC-4); There will be identical sessions at two different times of the day. Participants need only to register and attend one daily session.
To register: https://go.nasa.gov/3pmaz5U
Learning Objectives:
By the end of this training, attendees will be able to:
- Distinguish, compare, and contrast the biophysical conditions pre-and post-fire
- Analyze the key fire science criteria to select the appropriate data from satellites/instruments for a given watershed
- Acquire land use & land cover maps for the region of interest
- Select river basin and sub-basin boundaries for their region of interest
- Recognize how to develop a river basin-scale model using SWAT to simulate the quality and quantity of surface and groundwater
Course Format: Three, 1.5-hour parts
Twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/NASAARSET/status/1656728401795743748?s=20