Making Lidar FAIR for California’s Forest Climate Adaptation Planning Efforts

Abstract:

In the last decade the State of California has experienced a dramatic increase in extreme fire behavior, stand replacing fire events, tree mortality, private property and infrastructure damage, and loss of life. The California Climate Investments program directs the proceeds of Carbon emissions market to fund climate mitigation and adaptation projects. Forestry projects remain some of the most cost effective means of carbon sequestration. These programs have enabled shared stewardship on Federal and State lands as well as collaborative management of private forest lands for increased landscape fire resilience and stabilization of above ground Carbon pools. Over 250 nongovernmental organizations and local jurisdictions are engaged in developing forest and fire capacity programs across the State. A key requirement of these programs is to develop a robust project carbon budget. These Carbon budgets have been identified as a significant barrier to participation for small organizations. Airborne Lidar point clouds are currently one of the most powerful tool for assessing forest carbon stocks. In addition, potential operational benefits include identifying forest legacy elements, articulation of treatment scenarios, geotechnical hazards assessment, and current stand characterization. Existing models of geospatial data management employed by State and Federal land management agencies are ill suited to the distributed governance model that is emerging in the natural resource political economy. Many of the attributes of the FAIR science ethos are particularly important in this environment. Point cloud analytics is now critical computational infrastructure for planning ongoing landscape scale climate hazard mitigation. Reducing the barriers to technological adoption of these point cloud analysis techniques by the distributed forest planning community is a critical tool to facilitate achieving California’s climate objectives.