05/29/2026
Christopher Potter and co-author Sarah Owusu, former NASA summer intern from Bowie State University of Maryland, have published a new paper titled "Does Private Forest Land Management Result in Higher Burn Severity from Wildfires in Timberlands of the Pacific States?" Using Landsat image analysis of changes in biomass of managed timberlands throughout California, Oregon and Washington within large wildfires zones burned since 2013, results showed that 42% of these timberlands burned at significantly lower severity than their surrounding (unmanaged) 2-km buffer zones. In addition, 30% of managed forest lands were not significantly different from their unmanaged buffer zones in burn severity. The implications of these findings are that fuel reduction treatments can be detected from NASA satellite imagery and that these land management practices can mitigate wildfire behavior in expanding the use of forest thinning and prescribed burning for greater landscape resilience to future wildfires in forests of the western United States. The paper can be downloaded at https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=151619
There are many pressing scientific questions surrounding the topic of whether forest management has resulted in higher burn severity from recent wildfires in timberlands of the Pacific states. Using burn severity maps from Landsat satellite imagery, zonal statistics in QGIS were used to summarize an...
