Evidence:

• CECS defines their mission as to develop Science-based solutions for land management of California. The CECS defines the impacts of climate change as being on people's health and the resilience of California communities and the ecosystems. They define the effects of climate change on California as a major problem that affects the population of California and the environment. The Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions (CECS) is focused on developing science-based tools that California needs to effectively manage its natural lands for climate change.
• Source: Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions

Evidence:

• Who is involved (who works here, who makes decisions, who funds them etc...) The CECS brings together researchers, managers, and practitioners from across the state, who all work to improve the health and resilience of our communities and the ecosystems we depend on.
• Source: Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions

Explanation of Data:

Explanation of Evidence:

Implication #1:

• The website has maps that track Carbon Vulnerability and has a fire Progression Visualization Tool.

Explanation:

• The CECS Fire Behavior dataset captures daily fire spread for large, multi-day fires in California from 2012-2021 using active fire detections from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the Suomi-National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite. This standardized database includes both daily fire spread rate and fire radiative power, the radiative energy emitted from fire. It will be regularly updated to include more recent fire years.
• Carbon Vulnerability projections are based on random forest models, using four seasons of temperature and precipitation as input. The model is trained to fit the spatial distribution of aboveground carbon across California, provided by the California Air Resources Board. Data and code are also available for download in a public repository.

Implication #2:

• The maps are limited to only Carbon Vulnerability and a fire Progression Visualization Tool.

Explanation:

• This dataset is set up to match VIIRS fire detections with fires recorded in CAL FIRE's Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) database for coherence between both. Only fires active for more than one day are included because measuring daily fire spread using VIIRS requires comparisons of fire perimeters from multiple days of detections.
• Carbon Vulnerability projections only indicate climate-driven changes to aboveground live carbon stocks and do not account for changes in land management or other factors like CO2 fertilization. Projections also do not include dead or belowground carbon pools. The northern coastal forests and low/mid-elevation portions of the Sierra Nevada are most likely to lose carbon to the atmosphere over this century, in either moderate or extreme warming scenarios.

Implication #3:

• Technology could be used to improve the maps to have other trackers and have them be one map rather than separate maps.

Explanation:

• The visualization tool only depicts 34 of the largest fires in the dataset. VIIRS provides global measurements for the energy radiated from the Earth's surface every day. Hotspots in this data, where the energy radiated from the Earth is high, can be used to identify fires. By drawing a perimeter around detections of the same fire as it grows from day to day, researchers can measure the distance between daily perimeters in order to calculate the fire's daily spread rate.
• Because Carbon Vulnerability projections method relies on comparing the VIIRS fire detections from day to day to measure rate of spread, this dataset cannot assess a fire's rate of spread. Finally, the spread of more scattered fires, such as grass fires in desert landscapes where fires occur in patchy, less uniform patterns, are difficult to measure using this method.