Data science for forest ecology and management
I’m Derek Young, a Research Ecologist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis working at the intersection of forest disturbance ecology and data science. I also work part-time as a forest data scientist at Vibrant Planet.
I collect and analyze data to inform forest management in an era of climate change, drought, and large high-severity wildfires. I rely as much on large geospatial datasets as on field-based measurements of forests. I work closely with forest managers in an effort to tailor my research to pressing forest management needs.
Questions that drive my work include:
For mapping forest trees
I am developing an automated workflow to map forest trees over large (> 100 ha) areas using drone imagery. The workflow incorporates:
Following high-severity wildfire
I am building a non-linear spatially-explicit Bayesian model for predicting seed rain (and, subsequently, regeneration) of conifers following high-severity wildfire given a known spatial arrangement of surviving reproductive trees. Data on surviving tree spatial arrangement will be derived from drone imagery. To otbain dispersal data to train the model, I am coordinating intensive field surveys that involve documenting the density of regenerating conifers in a dense grid of plots across several recent severely burned areas.
Following high-severity wildfire
When replanting trees after high-severity wildfire, managers need to decide what trees to plant and where to plant them. These decisions can be difficult given anticipated climate change and limited resources. I am working on several projects to guide reforestation efforts:
The extreme California drought of 2012-2015 triggered extensive tree mortality across large areas of the state. I am analyzing large geospatial and plot-based datasets to understand:
Recent results:
Other current research projects include:
Find my publications on Google Scholar.
Google Scholar links to free PDFs for most of my publications, but if you need a PDF, contact me and I’ll happily send one!