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Abstract
Increased sedimentation following wildland fire can negatively impact water supply and water quality. Understanding how changing fire frequency, extent, and location will affect watersheds and the ecosystem services they supply to communities is of great societal importance in the western USA and throughout the world. In this work we assess the utility of the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) Sediment Retention Model to accurately characterize erosion and sedimentation of burned watersheds. InVEST was developed by the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University (Tallis et al., 2014) and is a suite of GIS-based implementations of common process models, engineered for high-end computing to allow the faster simulation of larger landscapes and incorporation into decision-making. The InVEST Sediment Retention Model is based on common soil erosion models (e.g., USLE – Universal Soil Loss Equation) and determines which areas of the landscape contribute the greatest sediment loads to a hydrological network and conversely evaluate the ecosystem service of sediment retention on a watershed basis. In this study, we evaluate the accuracy and uncertainties for InVEST predictions of increased sedimentation after fire, using measured postfire sediment yields available for many watersheds throughout the western USA from an existing, published large database. We show that the model can be parameterized in a relatively simple fashion to predict post-fire sediment yield with accuracy. Our ultimate goal is to use the model to accurately predict variability in post-fire sediment yield at a watershed scale as a function of future wildfire conditions.
| Publication type | Conference Paper |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Conference Paper |
| Title | Predicting watershed post-fire sediment yield with the InVEST sediment retention model: Accuracy and uncertainties |
| Year Published | 2015 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Joint Federal Interagency Conference |
| Contributing office(s) | Southwest Biological Science Center |
| Description | 12 p. |
| First page | 987 |
| Last page | 998 |
| Conference Title | 3rd Joint Federal Interagency Conference |
| Conference Location | Reno, NV |
| Conference Date | April 19-23, 2015 |
| Google Analytic Metrics | Metrics page |