California Forest Lidar Analytics Collaborative

Overview

California is in an unprecedented period of change in forest management. The dual mandates of public safety from wildfire and climate mitigation are clearly articulated objectives in management plans across the State. We are in an era of broad political and technical consensus on approaches for delivering on these objectives. In order to achieve these pace and scale goals, we also need to scale our analytic capacity using the best available geospatial tools. Point cloud analysis from airborne lidar and photogrammetry is the leading technology for this mission. These technologies have matured to a point where reliable long term workflows are feasible and necessary. Landscape wide lidar coverages are increasingly available. Focused efforts to operationalize these tools are now needed at the planning unit scale.

Goals

• Provide a shared computational platform for forest planners
• Educate users on the significance of FAIR(findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data practices for long term ecosystem management
• Establish common best practices for point cloud management
• Build capacity for high performance computing applications in forest and fire capacity.
• Develop a community of practice that bridges data science community and the forest resilience community

Milestones

1. Provide technical support for applicants in the California Climate Investments Forest Health and Forest Legacy Programs.
2. Support development and long term data management of pointcloud datasets for Regional Forest and Fire Capacity program
3. Develop cloud based tools for fire and forest planners

This program is a collaboration between the following organizations

• The Watershed Research and Training Center
• Humboldt County Resource Conservation District
• The Bay Area Councils, California Resilience Challenge
• Opentopography.org
• Unavco
• Cyverse

Tim Bailey's Cyverse Fall 2020 FOSS project page

Support or Contact

[email protected]