Creating a burn severity atlas across western US forests

Western Forest & Fire Resilience Collaborative

February 24, 2026 at 2pm ET

Burn severity is key to understanding the environmental impacts of wildfires. The Western Fire & Forest Resilience Collaborative’s Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Brian Harvey of the University of Washington, and his lab group are developing an atlas of multiple on-the-ground burn severity metrics across forests of the western United States. This atlas is calibrated using a network of more than 1,000 field plots with quantitative burn severity measurements. In this webinar, Dr. Michele S. Buonanduci and Dr. Harvey will present new results from this western US atlas with a focus on applications in the US Northern Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. Join this first webinar co-hosted by the Western Fire & Forest Resilience Collaborative, the Northwest Fire Science Consortium and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network. The burn severity atlas project is generously funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Wildfire Resilience Initiative and we thank them for their continued support of the Western Fire & Forest Resilience Collaborative.