7th Workshop on Forest Fire Management - EARSeL, European ...

CLASSIFICATION OF SITE AND STAND CHARACTERISTICS BASED ON
REMOTE SENSING DATA FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF FUEL MODELS
WITHIN A 3D GAP FOREST STAND MODEL
A. Arpaci 1 , N. Arndt 1 , M.J. Lexer 1 , M. Matiuzzi 2 , M. Müller 1 , H. Vacik 1
1 University of Natural resources and Applied Sciences, Vienna
Department of Forest-and Soil Sciences - Institute of Silviculture
2 University of Natural resources and Applied Sciences, Vienna
Department of Landscapes, Spatial and Infrastructure sciences
Institute of Surveying, Remote Sensing and Land information
alexander.arpaci@boku.ac.at
1 - Introduction
Austria is not known for its wild land fire history. But still in the last decade
wild land fires have draw attention by forest and landscape managers due
to their increasing numbers. With increasing temperatures and changing
precipitations patterns landscape might become even more vulnerable to
fire hazards. Hence fire has to be added to disturbance regimes which are
considered as drivers of ecosystem processes. Especially forest stands as
part of landscape patterns are driven by disturbance regimes like bark beetle
diseases, wind storms and fire. Important processes in forest development
like regeneration and inter species competition are therefore dependent
on the prevailing disturbance regime (Flemming, 2000, Ulanova, 2000,
Lundquist and Beatty, 2002). The Austrian Forest Fire Research Initiative
(AFFRI) tries to contribute to that fact. With the development of a fire disturbance
module for the forest stand /gap model PICUS (Lexer and
Hönninger, 2001; Seidl, 2005) a forest management decision support tool
will be designed. The currently most robust and used algorithm in fire modelling
the Rothermel model (Rothermel, 1972) for fire spread and behaviour
will be used to calculate the spread and behaviour of wild land fires under
different conditions for Austrian fire prone forest types. In this context fuel
models need to be developed, which allow an accurate prediction of forest
fire behaviour under different climatic and site conditions. In this contribution
we will present the process of the localization of Austrian forest
stands which are threatened by a high risk of wild land fires and will therefore
be selected for fuel sampling.
2 - Material & methods
The AFFRI project does benefit from previous research activities about
Austrian fire history (Gossow et al., 2008) over the last decade which gives
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