Vegetation biomass production is an important precursor for wildfire. Without sufficient biomass (fuel load and fuel continuity), fire will not carry across the landscape and will extinguish. Similarly, without sufficient biomass characteristics (low fuel moisture) a fire may simply fail to ignite. The proposed Climate and Biomass Production study at Idaho State University’s GIS Training and Research Center (ISU GIS TReC) will address an important question relative to biomass production and the observed increase in wildfire frequency seen over the past decades, especially across the western US; that is, what effect does climate and weather have on biomass production trends across the western US and has biomass production changed over the past two decades?

Five research questions have been developed to address this issue using a multi-decadal spatial dataset derived from NASA earth observing (EO) systems (MODIS (NDVI and SRTM), NOAA weather data (Climate Prediction Center) (CPC), as well as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) datasets). These data will be geo-statistically analyzed for correlation and trend determination following the approach described in this proposal.