August 14, 2019

Welcome to the workshop blog!

This is where stories from the participants of this workshop will be posted as they learn about the Pacific Northwest (PNW). There are three focuses for this workshop; Geology, Ecology, and Human issues. There will be 4 posts here from each group over the duration of this workshop where the participants chronicle their experiences in the PNW, and present what they have learned in regards to their selected focus. The last post will be about how what they learned about the PNW relates back to their own home in China.
For now, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Jonathan Batchelor and I am a PhD student at the university of Washington in the Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Lab (RSGAL).  The main area of focus for my studies is the characterization of biomass structure using high resolution/smaller scale remote sensing techniques (e.g. Terrestrial Laser Scanning [TLS], and Drone Digital Aerial Photogrammetry [DDAP]). Using these techniques, it is possible to look at how a forest changes after a disturbance event. We can quantify how much of a forest was consumed by a fire, as well as the severity of that fire at differing levels in the forest canopy. We can also relate the structure of a forest to the habitat of different animal species. This allows us to figure out the characteristics of the forests that species of particular concern like the spotted owl (Strix occidentalis) prefer. Please fill free to ask me about lidar or the use of drones in remote sensing, and we will have will us a brand new backpack lidar unit that participants will be able to use!

I just got back from Alaska where we used TLS to scan willow and alder shrubs. We intend to use this data to look at the biomass present within these shrub stands. With a warming climate, the location and abundance of many plant species is changing. There are elevational and latitudinal gradients that impact the distribution of species. As the climate is warming, plants are able to grow in areas of higher elevation and grow for a longer period of time before the cold winter temperatures set in. That means that shrubs like willow and alder in Alaska are able to get bigger faster, and move into areas that they previously weren’t able to survive. This growth and change in species distribution likely represents a big change in the biomass present at the higher elevations in Alaska.

We weren’t exclusively in the mountains however. We also got to spend time in some of the lowland marshes along the coast. While working in wetlands is fantastic, as wetlands are the drivers for so many biological processes… There are certain side effects of being up to your knees in water all day…