Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Maine
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Maine Project


Spatial relationships between burn patterns, pre-burn vegetation composition and distribution, and short-term vegetation recovery in Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia (collaborator: Paul Wetzel, Smith College)

May 2008 - February 2010


Personnel

Participating Agencies

  • USFWS Region 5
fire in Okefenokee Swamp, GA

1. Describe fire severity and fire spatial (patch size and shape) patterns based on spatial data currently available from ONWR (i.e., the 2007, 2.5m resolution SPOT panchromatic data). 2. Develop a vegetation classification of newly acquired (this study) satellite imagery with aerial photography and site-based sampling (limited to ground-truthing sites). 3. Compare the burn pattern descriptive analysis with new (this study) and archived (Loftin and McCloskey) vegetation classifications to document short-term vegetation change following the 2007 fires.

Presentations Presentation Date
Wetzel, P., and C.S. Loftin. Characteristics of a large, infrequent disturbance in a wetland ecosystem: Fire in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia, USA. 2010 Ecological Society of America annual meeting, 1-6 August, Pittsburg, PA. Wetzel presented. August 2010
Loftin, C.S., and P.Wetzel. 2011. Human perceptions and ecological effects of fire in Okefenokee Swamp; Department of Wildlife Ecology, University of Maine. Loftin presented. Invited. February 2011