RAPID: The impact of headwater wildfire burns on the export of materials to the coast

Wildfire suppression is a common forest management practice in the western world. However, land management practices for fire are shifting, and many communities and agencies are planning to prescribe more wildfire in fire-prone landscapes. At the same time, global climate change has increased extreme fire weather days in places like the western United States. From both a global climate change and a more regional land management perspective, fires will become a more commonplace land disturbance, and this expected increase in wildfire extent places even greater importance on bringing science up to speed with the effects of wildfire on watershed processes. Understanding of interacting hydrological and biogeochemical components in pre- and post-fire watersheds at-large remains limited and virtually nonexistent for coastal draining systems. This project will help fill this gap by: (1) leveraging gauged coastal watersheds with existing data that facilitates temporal comparisons of pre- and post-fire water quality and water yields, and (2) using multiple tracers to delineate source contributions from burned and unburned areas of each coastal watershed. Four of the five proposed study watersheds provide drinking water to ~90,000 citizens in Santa Cruz County. This project would build on city and county efforts to better understand the impacts of wildfire on municipal drinking water supply, and results will be shared with existing collaborators and contacts at the City of Santa Cruz, County of Santa Cruz, Bureau of Land Management, and California State Parks. This work will support two early-career female researchers and two students.

Small watersheds (

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.