Abaco Advanced Landscape & Ecosystem Monitoring

Funding Agency: US Northern Command and US Forest Service International Programs

Project Link: Abaco Advanced Landscape and Ecosystem Monitoring Project | FIU Institute of Environment

People: Cara Rockwell (FIU Earth & Environment, PI) / Brittany Harris (Co-PI, Project Lead) /  Michael Ross (FIU Earth & Environment, Co-PI) / Graduate Students: Latonya Williams, Demonica Brown / Undergraduate Interns: Don Daxon, Jr. /  Partners: Joe O’Brien, Louise Loudermilk, & Michael Gallagher (USFS ) / Jeffrey Cannon (The Jones Center at Ichauway) / Bahamas National Trust / Bahamas Forestry Unit

FIU Libraries GIS Center and FIU Institute of Environment was funded by the US Northern Command to develop climate resiliency strategies at the landscape-level across the Abaco Islands, post-hurricane Dorian (2019). This project aims to support disaster response and planning in the Bahamas, based on an innovative and integrated approach to exploit mature spatial technologies and state-of-the-art modeling frameworks to inform forest management in the face of catastrophic storm damage.

Bahamas pineyards are adapted to frequent fire and occur alongside fire-sensitive coppice forests. Despite differences in fire regimes, pineyards and coppice are ecologically important for many rare and endemic plants and animals. As hurricanes are predicted to increase in intensity in the future, effects of storms on forest fuels are likely to influence fire regimes. More severe fires resulting from increased fuel loading and altered fuels composition could have detrimental consequences for pine regeneration and decrease fire resistance of coppice forests. However, the interactions between fires, major hurricanes, and biodiversity are not well understood. The project aims to evaluate such interactions following Hurricane Dorian, which caused significant loss of pine canopy.

Research Scientist and project manager, Dr. Brittany Harris from FIU Libraries GIS Center and partners from FIU Institute of Environment, US Forest Service, Bahamas Forestry Unit, and Bahamas National Trust are integrating remote sensing technologies, such as aerial and ground-based laser scanning (i.e, LiDAR) and historical multispectral satellite imagery in conjunction with novel and traditional field measurements to accomplish the following goals:  1) quantify Hurricane Dorian’s impact on forest fuels, forest structure, pine regeneration, and biological diversity responses, (2) project the impacts of these changes on canopy recovery and long-term ecosystem resilience by examining interaction diversity, response diversity, fuels distribution and tree regeneration dynamics.