Southwest Fire Science Consortium

4D-FUELS: Semi-Automated Forest Structure and Fuel Mapping to Support Treatment Planning and Monitoring in the Southwest

October 27, 2026 | 11am PT/2pm ET

Dry forests in the western US are exposed to heightened risks of large, contiguous high-severity fire patches and limited forest regeneration as a result of fire exclusion and suppression and climate change. Planning fuels reduction activities and monitoring their effectiveness could be made more efficient with accurate, up-to-date maps of forest structure that are updated annually to measure changes in forest structure caused by disturbances and treatments.

This webinar from the Southwest Fire Science Consortium will introduce the 4D-FUELS system, a semi-automated system in Google Earth Engine that maps forest structure and fuels on an annual basis at a 10 meter by 10 meter resolution using Sentinel 1 and 2 satellite data trained and validated with measurements of forest structure derived from airborne lidar. This presentation will discuss 1) the development, validation, and accuracy of annual wall-to-wall maps of forest canopy cover, height, canopy base height, ladder fuel density, and mean tree diameter in the upper Rio Grande watershed in northern New Mexico, and 2) current efforts to use the workflow to measure fire- and treatment-caused changes in forest structure. Finally, the presentation will include a tutorial demonstrating how to use the 4D-FUELS Google Earth Engine code to produce maps of forest structural attributes for a target landscape and year.

Speakers: Emily Francis, Assistant Professor in Forest and Rangeland Stewardship at Colorado State University; Lilian Vallet, Postdoctoral Researcher at Colorado State University