Like wildfires, prescribed burns create smoke.
In a project at UC Berkeley’s Blodgett Experimental Forest, we’re teaming up with atmospheric scientists to study how much smoke prescribed fires produce and how the chemical composition of that smoke depends on forest structure. We’re combining some cutting-edge drone-based atmospheric samples with the novel fuels sampling protocol I’ve developed for the Pyregence project.
As of February 2022, the prescribed burns have been successfully completed and the atmospheric scientists at the heart of this project have already started releasing preliminary findings:
Sengupta, Deep, et al. “Quantifying emission factors from prescribed burns in California mixed conifer forest.” AGU Fall Meeting 2021. AGU, 2021. https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/997150
Sengupta, Deep, et al. “Understanding near-source smoke composition of prescribed burning using a customized miniature-sensor platform on uncrewed airborne systems (UAS).” AGU Fall Meeting 2021. AGU, 2021. https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/994019
The effect of the prescribed burns on the spatial pattern of surface fuels is quantified in my dissertation.
Photo credit: OptoKnowledge System Inc