A professor of biology at the University of Maine at Farmington and a team of five other forest scientists will use a $597,000 grant from NASA to see whether thinning in Arizona ponderosa pine forest increases water supplies for wild ecosystems and human communities.
Andrew Barton is a forest and fire ecologist, science writer and professor of biology. His current research focuses on the response of forests and endangered plants to changing climate and wildfire in the Southwest.
Barton will join scientists from Wesleyan University and Northern Arizona University, including the team leader, Temuulen Sankey, on the Arizona project. The three-year project is based on findings that ponderosa pine forests in the western U.S. have be
en greatly altered by 20th-century fire suppression policies that have led to dense stands of trees now vulnerable to wildfires.
At the same time, the burning of fossil fuels has led to warmer and drier conditions. The mix has led to catastrophic wildfires and severe drought.
“Drought and wildfire are causing widespread death of trees in western forests and serious impacts on human communities,” Barton said in a news release. “Thinning is not an appropriate climate solution for all forests, but in ponderosa pine forests, it might just be a route to helping protect this precious resource.”
The project will employ space instruments to extrapolate the findings to the entire state of Arizona. A major goal is to assess the capacity of the International Space Station’s ECOSTRESS thermal radiometer, a NASA project that started in 2018, to quantify the severity of drought across large swaths of the landscape.
The research team will employ onsite weather stations, underground soil moisture meters, sap-flow sensors inserted into trees, laser-equipped drones, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges), and satellite and space station sensors. The instruments will measure how thinning alters temperature, water balance, drought severity and tree growth in ponderosa pine forests in northern Arizona.
Barton is also the author of the award-winning book, “The Changing Nature of the Maine Woods,” and co-editor of “Ecology and Recovery of Old-growth Forests in Eastern North America.” He has worked for many years with Maine environmental groups, including the UMF Sustainable Campus Coalition, Mt. Blue-Tumbledown Conservation Alliance, a working group with the Maine Climate Council and the science advisory board for Maine’s Ecological Reserve System. He teaches courses about ecology, conservation, and forests as well as a travel course to Costa Rica.
