Progress 07/15/24 to 07/14/25
Outputs Target Audience:Our audiences include educators and disaster response professionals, landowners and rangeland resource managers, students and public. Educators and disaster response professionals learn new cutting-edge technologies for rapid and cost-effective assessment.Landowners and rangeland resource managers learn near-real time forage and structure damage and recovery for timely future plans.Students and public develop awareness of rangeland disasters, the threats to them, and effective mitigation strategies. Changes/Problems:The major changes in approach is about our development of remote sensing based wildfire building damageassessment. We improved our model to be applicable under all weather conditions. This is mainly because when we are doing the assessment of building damage, the California wildfire happed and we noticed thick smoke weather condition couldhamperthe assessment from space. The California wildfire smoke weather made us revise our current optical remote sensing based methods into data fution of SAR (Synthetic apertureradar)and Optical remote sensing images to make our assessment have the capacity to penetrate smoke cover from space observation. Now we revised our model to be able to apply in all weather conditions. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has provided extension training programs for county agencies and wildfire response professionals for wildfire response, we also provided internshipsand postdoc research opportunities for young scientists to train the cutting edge observation technologies for wildfire damage assessment. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Our results have been disseminated to communities via multiple out-reach activities. For example, the Great Plains Fire Summit was held in Canyon TX in 2024 summer, we had more than 250 participants attended including landowners, prescribed burn associations, volunteer fire departments, state and federal agencies, universities, and non-profit organizations. Other major activities include: •March 6, 2025: Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, 190 participants, "Determining Damages from Wildfires." •March 15, 2025: Upper llanos Prescribed Bur Association, 40 participants, "Assessing Wildfire Damage". •April 1, 2025: Texas Master Naturalists, 120 participants, "Understanding Fire Effects." •April 4, 2025:Prescribed Burn Board, Texas Department of Agriculture, 25 participants, "Documenting Wildfire Damages". •April 8, 2025: Reagan County Rangeland Day, 20 participants,"Strategically Rebuilding Following Wildfire". •April 8, 2025: Upton County Brush and Weed Program, 5 participants,"Understanding Wildfire Response". •April 9, 2025: Scurry County Agricultural Program, 40 participants,"Managing Post-Fire Rangeland". •Wildfire Preparedness Meeting, February 13, Canadian, TX •Hemphill County Beef Conference April 29-30, Canadian, TX •December 18: North Region Ag Conference (online and in-person to 16 counties), 341 participants •January 21: Fire and Rangeland Management Symposium, Pampa, TX What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We plan to collect more input from local stakeholders for forage recovery information after the wildfire; we also need more time to test our platform; and Panhandle region is experiencing extendeddrought impacts and we plan to take more time to monitor the impact on the wildfire recovery of forage biomass.
Impacts What was accomplished under these goals?
We have developed the remote sensing and AI based rapid assessment model for wildfire damage of agriculture infrastructure, and have identified building damage location and severityover Panhandle region. We have also developed time-series based forage lossand recovery maps over Panhandle wildfire region. We have conducted a series of outreach activities to seek input from key stakeholders for decision support tool development.
Publications
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