AAIR Project No PL 94-2392

Objectives
The objective is to determine the main factors which control snow, wind and fire damage. These factors are crucial in establishing when and where damage will occur and which silvicultural practices reduce or increase the risk. The overall aim is to determine values for the critical parameters required to support the development of the models in the subsequent tasks.

Methodology
Wood properties such as strength and density, crucial indetermining snow and wind damage, will be obtained from uprooted, snapped and standing tree populations. This will be compared with information from more extensive, but less detailed, measurements of wood properties from common forest trees in Britain, Sweden and Finland. The factors controlling wind damage will be obtained from tree pulling experiments in Britain and Finland. Data is already available from over 1300 trees in Britain and new experiments on up to 100 trees will be conducted in Finland. The role of dynamic ractors in influencing wind damage will be assessed from tree sway studies already executed in Britain and Finland and from new experiments in Finland and Ireland. Forest fire prevention includes both fuel management and determining areas of greatest risk. For this task, fuel material will be sampled with the locations recorded using GPS positioning equipment. Laboratory and field spectroradiometry will be carried out for gathering pure spectral signatures and mixed spectral data. Details of the methodology is given in Sub-tasks described below.

Last modified: Mon Jun 24 16:47:58 BST 1996