The purpose of this study was to spatially represent shrub fuel matrices accurately and at fine resolution for use in physics-based fire behavior simulations. Terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (T-LiDAR) was used to measure shrub fuel beds in laboratory settings before and after fire burned through them. The primary goals of this research were to produce highly descriptive data-sets that correctly identified the locations of biomass within 3-D space without destructive sampling, and to derive attributes for fuel elements within the shrubs. This research was completed in two phases. First, a series of experiments was conducted to test the capacity of a commercially available LiDAR instrument for making detailed measurements of diffuse shrubs. Second, model shrub fuel beds were produced and evaluated for accuracy. The research tested the T-LiDARs ability to characterize physical traits of shrubs within volumes, identified issues associated with misrepresenting the true geometry of scanned samples, developed sampling protocols for scanning shrubs prior to and following combustion experimentation, and built descriptive models of actual shrubs. The findings of this study show that T-LiDAR can be used effectively to estimate volume, structure, and biomass for individual shrubs. T-LiDAR derived models were shown to accurately predict mass of scanned shrubs (Adj. R2: 0.598, P-Value: 0.0012). The models produced show vast improvements from past estimations of physiological characteristics in fuels and fire behavior.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-03062014-115425 |
| Date | 02 April 2014 |
| Creators | Adams, Theodore |
| Contributors | Dr. Ragan Callaway, Dr. LLoyd Queen, Dr. Carl Seielstad |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-03062014-115425/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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