Fire and climate change impacts in a tropical biodiversity hotspot (Rwenzori Mtns, Uganda): remote sensing to understand abrupt ecosystem change
PI: Sarah Ivory (Geoscience)
The level of effort appropriate for the proposed project: 1 semester at 50% RA or summer 2026
Plan for funding tuition: existing NSF grant
A list of specific areas of computational and/or data science expertise or skills: remote sensing, burn area identification, land cover classification
Any other requirements or expectations: attendance at regular group meetings and weekly one-on-one meetings
A list of specific objectives for work:
• Identify burned area in remote tropical mountain
• Analyze changing landcover in a remote tropical mountain
• Link differences in landcover to changing climate and fire
• Collaborate in the writing of a scientific paper based on the results
At least one medium to long-term goal: this is a pretty small project, but could easily be a really nice scientific publication
A short statement explaining the connection of the project to ICDS’s mission: Tropical mountains house biodiverse communities of unique plant species but are also disproportionately at risk from climate change. Understanding and managing these changes has important ecological and societal implications given the important ecosystem services that these environments support. In this project, we seek to use remote sensing data to map fire and vegetation change using computation and machine learning algorithms in the Rwenzori Mtns, Uganda. This project connects to the mission of ICDS to “address research questions of scientific and social importance” that can only be approached through “multi and interdisciplinary teams”.
A paragraph summarizing team member’s recent and/or planned engagement with ICDS: Sarah Ivory gave a short lightning talk at ICDS Day this academic year to find collaborators in applied and fundamental research in global environmental change and paleoecology in Africa. She would like to establish a more lasting collaboration with ICDS affiliates taking the form of grant proposals and jointly advised students.
Project Description:
Motivation: African mountains are biodiversity hotspots that house plants that occur nowhere else on Earth and provide essential ecosystem services such as food, freshwater, and medicine (Niang et al., 2014). The Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda are a UNESCO World Heritage site and Ugandan national park, a headwater of the Nile River, and house some of the few remaining tropical glaciers. Recent climate change impacts in this region, such as increased fires and upslope migration of vegetation, have been anecdotally reported largely by park rangers and suggest this area is particularly sensitive to changes in climate (Jacobs et al., 2016; Ivory, pers comm).
Further, increased flooding in villages around the mountain has resulted in property damage and loss of life (Jacobs et al., 2016). In particular, a flash flood in May 2013 in the Nyamwamba watershed resulted in the destruction of 70 buildings (including a hospital and a school) and numerous fatalities. The direct cause of this flooding is still poorly understood and likely involves the complicated interplay of a wildfire in the previous year in the headwater drainage and climate/ecosystem change (Jacobs et al., 2016; Quandt et al., 2017).
Local governments and communities need information in order to develop conservation plans around fire and climate adaptation for loss of ecosystem services, yet there are significant fundamental gaps in basic knowledge that prevent this. For example, the full spatial extent of the 2012 fire is not directly known, and vegetation recovery following the event is largely available through local park guides’ stories. The impacts of climate and human land use pressures are virtually unknown due to the remote area and challenging access from lack of infrastructure. In other words, what makes this place so special and pristine is also what makes it hard to study.
Remote sensing of burned area and land cover change may be the only way of studying how these remote landscapes change and how quickly they change with climate. This project proposes to develop a framework for studying tropical mountain ecosystem response to fire and climate impacts on ecosystems using remote sensing data.
Objectives and Workplan: This project will use remote sensing data (primarily Landsat, MODIS, ASTER) to reconstruct fire burned areas on a remote mountain. In order to determine vegetation impacts, supervised and unsupervised landcover classification will be conducted before and after a large wildfire in order to evaluate resilience versus permanent abrupt ecosystem tipping points. The junior researcher will work with a team of ecologists and paleoecologists to map for the first time changes in forest and alpine ecosystem extent over time and summarize this in a paper and for local government officials.