RESPONSE REACTION OF SCOTS PINE PINUS SYLVESTRIS L. AFTER FOREST FIRE IN FOREST SITE TYPE HYLOCOMIOSA

Author(s):  
Lāsma FREIMANE ◽  
Mārtiņš AILTS

Many factors explain the importance of the research: role of forest industry in Latvian national economy, predicted climate changes in future that foresee better conditions for forest fires, and the fact that until this moment in Latvia there is very little research about radial growth dynamic after forest fire. Object of the research is surface fire affected middle-age managed Scots pine stands in forest site type Hylocomiosa. The empirical material was collected in 500 m2 large circular sample plots in both fire affected and fire unaffected parts of forest stands. At sample plots, dendrometric parameters of trees were measured. After low to medium intensity surface fire forest stand radial growth dynamics is positive, but effect of forest fire impact is negligible – in six year period six cubic meters per hectare or in average one cubic meter per hectare per year. Forest fire significantly does not affect mortality of trees in middle-age Scots pine forest stand in forest site type Hylocomiosa, p = 0.19 > α= 0.05. Minimal financial loss as result of deadwood volume after forest fire is 2179.00 EUR ha-1.

Author(s):  
Olga MIEZĪTE ◽  
Ineta EGLĪTE ◽  
Solveiga LUGUZA ◽  
Imants LIEPA

One of the most important stand productivity and competition indicators is height annual increment, which is affected by various factors such as soil preparation, initial density as well as various management risk factors. Empirical material for the research was collected in the northern part of Latvia. In four pure Scots pine stands in Myrtillosa forest site type 29 circular plots tree diameter, height and the last five years annual height increment was measured and visual state of health was described. The aim of this research is to analyse Scots pine height annual increment in naturally regenerated young forest stands in Myrtillosa site type forest stands and to give an evaluation of the impact of the initial stand density and the health status on height growth. The mean height increment in studied stands is 0.26 ± 0.009 m and the average periodical increment is 0.37 ± 0.042 m. The annual height increment has been in the height range from 0.23 to 0.53 m. Initial stand density affects the annual height increment significantly. In the stand with an initial density of 5770 ± 961 trees the height increment during the last five years has risen by 36%, but in stand with initial density of 12,650 ± 1,581 trees (P = 51.8 % and R = 6.0 %) the height increment during the five-years period has increased by only 12 %. The tree health status does not affect the tree height increment significantly.


Author(s):  
Jianwei Li ◽  
Xiaowen Li ◽  
Chongchen Chen ◽  
Huiru Zheng ◽  
Naiyuan Liu

Forest fire is one of the most frequent, fast spreading and destructive natural disasters. Many countries have developed their own fire prediction model and computational systems to predict the fire spreading, however, the user interaction, display effect and prediction accuracy have not yet met the requirements for firefighting in real forest fire events. The forest fire spreading is a complex process affected by multi-factors. Understanding the relationships between these multi-factors and the forest fire spreading trend is vital to predicting the fire spreading promptly and accurately to make the strategy in extinguishing the forest fire. In this paper, we propose and develop a three-dimensional (3D) forest fire spreading simulation system, FFSimulator, to visualize the impact of multi-factors to the fire spread. FFSimultor integrates the multi-factor analysis approach with the FARSITE prediction model to improve the prediction. The FFSimulator developed applies 3D scene organization, template-based vector data mapping and overlaps visualization techniques to provide a 3D dynamic visualization of large-scale forest fire. The 3D multi-factors superposition analysis simulates the impacts of individual factor and multi-factors on the trend of surface fire spreading, which can be used to identify the key sites for the prevention and the control of forest fires. The system has been tested and evaluated using real data of Shanghan forest fire.


2014 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Stefańska-Krzaczek ◽  
Paweł Pech

Abstract The utility of phytocenotic indices in the diagnosis and classification of forest sites might be limited because of vegetation degeneration in managed forests. However, even in secondary communities it may be possible to determine indicator species, although these may differ from typical and well known plant indicators. The aim of this work was to assess the vegetation diversity of Scots pine stands in representative forest site types along a moisture and fertility gradient. In total 120 sample plots from Turawa forests were included in the study. These plots represented young (21-40 years) and old (> 80 years) Scots-pine-dominated stands. The forest sites were categorised according to Polish site classification. Four site categories were studied: Bśw (very nutrient-poor and mesic sites), BMśw (nutrient-poor and mesic sites), BMw (nutrient-poor and moist sites), LMw (quite nutrient-rich and moist sites). The species composition of the forest patches studied hardly differed among forest site types. Almost all of the vegetation in site Bśw was different from both moist site types (BMw and LMw). Sites Bśw and LMw had the exclusive species determined as site indicators. Moreover, young stands had their own site type indicator species which differed from old stands. Numerical classification showed that only two plant communities were widespread: Leucobryo- Pinetum in Bśw and BMśw, and the community of Pinus sylvestris and Molinia caerulea in BMśw, BMw, LMw. In secondary communities typical indicator species may not be useful, but it is possible to determinate species that are locally unique to forest site type. Despite the convergence in the composition of the plant community resulting from tree stand unification, plant communities have the capacity for a more diverse composition. Tree stand conversion can increase phytocenotic diversity


AGROFOR ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aigars INDRIKSONS ◽  
Edgars DUBROVSKIS ◽  
Lelde HERMANE ◽  
Andis KALNINS

Most of the ground cover vegetation descriptions given for characteristic of certainforest site types are made for mature forest stands. However the site typeestimation for the practical forest inventory needs knowledge about the vegetationin every age class of forest. The clearcut as an artificial forest disturbance causesdramatically changes in plant community. Especially fast changes proceed duringthe first years after the clearcut. Due to increase of temperature and nutrientavailability there proceeds several processes causing significant changes in groundcover vegetation. In 2015 a research was started to clarify the changes in groundcover vegetation in Hylocomiosa forest site type. This forest site type is mostabundant in Latvian forests taking around 22%. The dominant tree species inHylocomiosa is Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) although the silver birch (Betulapendula Roth), Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karsten) and aspen (Populustremula L.) can form a tree stand there. The chronosequence method was used byproviding the inventory at 5 tree stands dominated by pine. Six sample plots ateach forest stand with size of 10 m2 were established. The point-square method byusing of 1mm thick and 1m high metallic needle was used for registration of plantsat each square of sample plot. The inventory showed significant changes of speciescomposition and projective cover of moss species and caulescent plants. Theresults of calculation of the Ellenberg’s ecological values and Tschekanovskycoefficient suggest of appearance of plants with another attitude to the ecologicalfactors.


2018 ◽  
Vol 169 (5) ◽  
pp. 260-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Wohlgemuth ◽  
Violette Doublet ◽  
Cynthia Nussbaumer ◽  
Linda Feichtinger ◽  
Andreas Rigling

Vegetation shift in Scots pine forests in the Valais accelerated by large disturbances In the past dozen years, several studies have concluded a vegetation shift from Scots pine to oak (pubescent and sessile) forests in the low elevated zones of the Valais. It is, however, not fully clear in which way such a vegetation shift actually occurs and on which processes such a shift would be based. Two studies, one on the tree demography in the intact Pfynwald and the other on the tree regeneration on the large Leuk forest fire patch, serve to discuss different aspects of the shift from Scots pine to oak. The forest stands of Pfynwald consist of 67% Scots pines and 14% oaks. Regenerating trees are 2–3.5 times more frequent in small gaps than under canopy. In gaps of the Upper Pfynwald, seedlings and saplings of Scots pine are three times more abundant than oaks, while both species regenerate in similar quantities under canopy. In the Lower Pfynwald, young oaks – especially seedlings – are more frequent than Scots pines. A different process is going on at the lower part in the Leuk forest fire patch where Scots pines prevailed before the burn of 2003. While Scots pines regenerate exclusively close to the edge of the intact forest, oaks not only resprout from trunk but also profit from unlimited spreading of their seeds by the Eurasian jay. Regeneration from seeds are hence observed in the whole studied area, independent of the proximity of seed trees. After the large fire disturbance, a mixed forests with a high share of oaks is establishing, which translates to a rapid vegetation shift. The two trajectories are discussed in the light of climate change.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 768
Author(s):  
Jin Pan ◽  
Xiaoming Ou ◽  
Liang Xu

Forest fires are serious disasters that affect countries all over the world. With the progress of image processing, numerous image-based surveillance systems for fires have been installed in forests. The rapid and accurate detection and grading of fire smoke can provide useful information, which helps humans to quickly control and reduce forest losses. Currently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have yielded excellent performance in image recognition. Previous studies mostly paid attention to CNN-based image classification for fire detection. However, the research of CNN-based region detection and grading of fire is extremely scarce due to a challenging task which locates and segments fire regions using image-level annotations instead of inaccessible pixel-level labels. This paper presents a novel collaborative region detection and grading framework for fire smoke using a weakly supervised fine segmentation and a lightweight Faster R-CNN. The multi-task framework can simultaneously implement the early-stage alarm, region detection, classification, and grading of fire smoke. To provide an accurate segmentation on image-level, we propose the weakly supervised fine segmentation method, which consists of a segmentation network and a decision network. We aggregate image-level information, instead of expensive pixel-level labels, from all training images into the segmentation network, which simultaneously locates and segments fire smoke regions. To train the segmentation network using only image-level annotations, we propose a two-stage weakly supervised learning strategy, in which a novel weakly supervised loss is proposed to roughly detect the region of fire smoke, and a new region-refining segmentation algorithm is further used to accurately identify this region. The decision network incorporating a residual spatial attention module is utilized to predict the category of forest fire smoke. To reduce the complexity of the Faster R-CNN, we first introduced a knowledge distillation technique to compress the structure of this model. To grade forest fire smoke, we used a 3-input/1-output fuzzy system to evaluate the severity level. We evaluated the proposed approach using a developed fire smoke dataset, which included five different scenes varying by the fire smoke level. The proposed method exhibited competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 432
Author(s):  
Aru Han ◽  
Song Qing ◽  
Yongbin Bao ◽  
Li Na ◽  
Yuhai Bao ◽  
...  

An important component in improving the quality of forests is to study the interference intensity of forest fires, in order to describe the intensity of the forest fire and the vegetation recovery, and to improve the monitoring ability of the dynamic change of the forest. Using a forest fire event in Bilahe, Inner Monglia in 2017 as a case study, this study extracted the burned area based on the BAIS2 index of Sentinel-2 data for 2016–2018. The leaf area index (LAI) and fractional vegetation cover (FVC), which are more suitable for monitoring vegetation dynamic changes of a burned area, were calculated by comparing the biophysical and spectral indices. The results showed that patterns of change of LAI and FVC of various land cover types were similar post-fire. The LAI and FVC of forest and grassland were high during the pre-fire and post-fire years. During the fire year, from the fire month (May) through the next 4 months (September), the order of areas of different fire severity in terms of values of LAI and FVC was: low > moderate > high severity. During the post fire year, LAI and FVC increased rapidly in areas of different fire severity, and the ranking of areas of different fire severity in terms of values LAI and FVC was consistent with the trend observed during the pre-fire year. The results of this study can improve the understanding of the mechanisms involved in post-fire vegetation change. By using quantitative inversion, the health trajectory of the ecosystem can be rapidly determined, and therefore this method can play an irreplaceable role in the realization of sustainable development in the study area. Therefore, it is of great scientific significance to quantitatively retrieve vegetation variables by remote sensing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7773
Author(s):  
San Wang ◽  
Hongli Li ◽  
Shukui Niu

The Sichuan province is a key area for forest and grassland fire prevention in China. Forest resources contribute significantly not only to the biological gene pool in the mid latitudes but also in reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases and slowing down global warming. To study and forecast forest fire change trends in a grade I forest fire danger zone in the Sichuan province under climate change, the dynamic impacts of meteorological factors on forest fires in different climatic regions were explored and a model between them was established by using an integral regression in this study. The results showed that the dominant factor behind the area burned was wind speed in three climatic regions, particularly in Ganzi and A’ba with plateau climates. In Ganzi and A’ba, precipitation was mainly responsible for controlling the number of forest fires while it was mainly affected by temperature in Panzhihua and Liangshan with semi-humid subtropical mountain climates. Moreover, the synergistic effect of temperature, precipitation and wind speed was responsible in basin mid-subtropical humid climates with Chengdu as the center and the influence of temperature was slightly higher. The differential forest fire response to meteorological factors was observed in different climatic regions but there was some regularity. The influence of monthly precipitation in the autumn on the area burned in each climatic region was more significant than in other seasons, which verified the hypothesis of a precipitation lag effect. Climate warming and the combined impact of warming effects may lead to more frequent and severe fires.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101053952110317
Author(s):  
Bin Jalaludin ◽  
Frances L. Garden ◽  
Agata Chrzanowska ◽  
Budi Haryanto ◽  
Christine T. Cowie ◽  
...  

Smoke from forest fires can reach hazardous levels for extended periods of time. We aimed to determine if there is an association between particulate matter ≤2.5 µm in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5) and living in a forest fire–prone province and cognitive function. We used data from the Indonesian Family and Life Survey. Cognitive function was assessed by the Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM). We used regression models to estimate associations between PM2.5 and living in a forest fire–prone province and cognitive function. In multivariable models, we found very small positive relationships between PM2.5 levels and RCPM scores (PM2.5 level at year of survey: β = 0.1%; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.01% to 0.19%). There were no differences in RCPM scores for children living in forest fire–prone provinces compared with children living in non-forest fire–prone provinces (mean difference = −1.16%, 95% CI = −2.53% to 0.21%). RCPM scores were lower for children who had lived in a forest fire–prone province all their lives compared with children who lived in a non-forest fire–prone province all their life (β = −1.50%; 95% CI = −2.94% to −0.07%). Living in a forest fire–prone province for a prolonged period of time negatively affected cognitive scores after adjusting for individual factors.


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