Residents in the Matanuska-Susitna and Kenai areas can assess their level of wildfire risk with new online maps developed by ISER research and associate professor Jen Schmidt as part of the Arctic Risks and Adaptations (AURA) project.
The maps illustrate potential for wildfire risk based on the ability of vegetation to carry a fire and throw embers. The underlying vegetation is from Landsat imagery (30m) from the NASA ABoVE program. Schmidt has developed exposure maps for Anchorage, Fairbanks and Whitehorse, Yukon, and there’s a similar map available for the entire state of Alaska.
The Matanuska-Susitna Borough is already sharing the maps with local home and business owners. It developed a fire preparedness webpage to help inform residents of what they can do to protect against wildfire damage. The new fire hazard maps will be an integral component to showing residents the potential fire hazards in and around their land, said the Borough’s Natural Resource Manager Emerson Krueger.
“The Matanuska-Susitna Borough is grateful for the recent effort of UAA – ISER to produce fire hazard maps. They provide granularity to explore the fire hazard at neighborhood levels, at parcel levels, where prior to this we didn’t have the scientific backing to it. The Borough will use these maps to prioritize fuel reduction efforts.”
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The AURA project, officially titled “Collaborative Research: Arctic Urban Risks and Adaptations (AURA): a co-production framework for addressing multiple changing environmental hazards” is part of the National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic Initiative. Grant number: 1927563.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2021, its budget is $8.5 billion. NSF funds research in all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 50,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards.
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