Peter G Barney

M.A. Student, Geography & Regional Development

BA 2002 Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara

Phone: (520) 240-2661
E-mail: pbarney1@email.arizona.edu

440 Harvill Building, Box #2
Tucson, AZ 85721
USA

Curriculum Vitae

Research

My research interests are in the fields of remote sensing, GIS, fire ecology, and geovisualization. My thesis research involves the characterization of fire fuels in the Valles Caldera National Preserve. The VCNP lies in the Jemez Mountains of Northern New Mexico. I spent the past two and a half summers in this beautiful wooded preserve, collecting data. These data characterize fire fuels at 256 points. My goal for this project is to interpolate these point data across the landscape using Landsat satellite imagery. I will use FLAMMAP software to create maps of various measures of potential fire severity. Perhaps the most important of these measures is "crown fire potential", which ranks the likelihood that a fire will climb into the tree canopy and kill the trees. The product of my thesis work will be a single map ranking fire hazard potential which I will deliver to the Valles Caldera Trust, overseers of the VCNP. This map could be used to guide the application of prescribed burns and mechanical thinning at the preserve. If successful, the technique will be applicable to other forests of the Southwest.

Project Involvement

• Fire Fuels Mapping for the Valles Caldera National Preserve