Creating a Soil Vulnerability Index to identify drought sensitive areas - Final Report
Final Project Report
Summary
Project Accomplishments: 1) A soil vulnerability index was created for the NP LCC. It is being incorporated into a visualization tool with the CA LCC in a Multi-LCC project. 2) Statistical analyses were performed on correlations between forest mortality (>50 of a stand) and soil characteristics in the NP LCC between 1997 and 2010. In California and Oregon, soil characteristics, especially available soil water storage capacity and pH were predictors in areas of tree mortality. In Washington, soil did not improve predictability of forest mortality. (unpublished) 3) New MC2 simulations were run with the AR5 data. These are available on databasin.org. 4) The new MC2 AR5 simulations were used in a sensitivity analysis of MC2 to soil data. [...]
Summary
Project Accomplishments:
1) A soil vulnerability index was created for the NP LCC. It is being incorporated into a visualization tool with the CA LCC in a Multi-LCC project.
2) Statistical analyses were performed on correlations between forest mortality (>50 of a stand) and soil characteristics in the NP LCC between 1997 and 2010. In California and Oregon, soil characteristics, especially available soil water storage capacity and pH were predictors in areas of tree mortality. In Washington, soil did not improve predictability of forest mortality. (unpublished)
3) New MC2 simulations were run with the AR5 data. These are available on databasin.org.
4) The new MC2 AR5 simulations were used in a sensitivity analysis of MC2 to soil data. The results of this showed that the Century portion of MC2 is very sensitive to soil depth, which affects hydrology and carbon variables, and the fire module is not as sensitive to soil depth. A paper including these results will be submitted to Ecological Modeling for publication.
5) Sensitivity to soils in 3-PG was performed. By both Wendy Peterman and Amanda Mathys. Mathys (of University of British Columbia) published a paper:
http://www.fsl.orst.edu/~waring/Publications/pdf/Mathys%20et%20al%202014%20.pdf. Data from this study and predictive maps of forest vulnerability are in the NP LCC gallery on databasin.org: http://databasin.org/galleries/33a551e59b824cf7ab908644fb420880#expand=9093.
