vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Forest Stewardship | CAL FIRE
There have been periods in the past when photosynthesis exceeded respiration and organic material built up forming coal, oil, and natural gas over millions of years—the “fossil fuels.” When these fuels are extracted and burned for energy this previously stored carbon is released. This is the carbon that is largely responsible for the current increase in greenhouse gases driving global climate change.

Where do forests fit in?
Forest carbon is found in five major areas (called pools): above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, litter, dead wood, and organic carbon in the soil. The way we manage forests affects the dynamics of each pool. 
Forests can take carbon out of the atmosphere, thereby countering some fossil fuel emissions.
This can be done at a low cost and we have the tools necessary—the technology for growing and managing trees is well known.
There are two main parts to the greenhouse gas equation: 1) the release of gases (mostly carbon) into the atmosphere, and 2) the removal of those gases. Most attention to date has been directed toward the first part through efforts to reduce the amount of CO2 released from fossil fuels. The focus on forests is an attempt to increase the second part of the equation: carbon removal and storage.
Forests play a dual role. They are a carbon sink (take up carbon) through photosynthesis but become an emission source (release carbon) when forests are lost and the land converted to other uses. Along with growing healthy forests it is vital to prevent forest loss. Worldwide, about 20% of today’s human-caused global CO2 emissions have been attributed to forest loss.

Fire
Fire is an important part of the carbon cycle. Fire consumes organic matter, releasing greenhouse gases including CO2, methane, carbon monoxide, and other materials. Trees and plants not immediately consumed in the fire may be killed and decompose rapidly, releasing CO2. 
Although fire produces carbon emissions, it is also a natural and necessary part of the ecosystem, especially in California where plants are adapted to fire. Rather than eliminate fire, the goal is to maintain historical fire regimes and thus avoid catastrophic fires that occur when fuels build up to unnatural levels.

Biomass to energy
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Tech Today: NASA Helps Find Where the Wildfires Are - NASA
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Aerosols: Tiny Particles, Big Impact
Desert dust, volatile organic compounds from vegetation, smoke from forest fires, and volcanic ash are natural sources of aerosols. (Photographs copyright (left to right) Western Sahara Project, Jonathan Jessup, Vox, and Ludie Cochrane.)

Automobiles, incinerators, smelters, and power plants are prolific producers of sulfates, nitrates, black carbon, and other particles. Deforestation, overgrazing, drought, and excessive irrigation can alter the land surface, increasing the rate at which dust aerosols enter the atmosphere. Even indoors, cigarettes, cooking stoves, fireplaces, and candles are sources of aerosols.

Patterns
When viewed from space, a number of patterns emerge from Earth’s aerosols—some driven by nature and others by man.
Nature generates broad swaths of particles—detectable by satellites—over both water and land. The strong winds of the “roaring forties” latitudes, for example, create a heavy band of airborne salt north of Antarctica. A thinner and more evenly dispersed veil of aerosols—primarily salt from whitecaps and sulfates from microalgae—usually covers most of the world’s oceans. Over land, massive plumes of dust blow above deserts.

This map shows the global distribution of aerosols and the proportion of those aerosols that are large or small. Intense colors indicate a thick layer of aerosols. Yellow areas are predominantly coarse particles, like dust, and red areas are mainly fine aerosols, like smoke or pollution. Gray indicates areas with no data. (NASA map by Robert Simmon, based on MODIS data from NASA Earth Observations.)

Meanwhile, the eastern portion of the United States and urban areas in Europe are hotspots for the production of human-made aerosols. Plumes of industrial aerosols — typically sulfates from coal power plants and black and organic carbon from vehicle traffic — rise from cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, London, and Berlin.
The western portion of the United States is comparatively clear, though some areas experience aerosol loads that rival the worst conditions in the East. Industrial aerosols, dust, and wildfire smoke frequently pollute the air in the Los Angeles Basin.
NASA “Wildfire Digital Twin” Pioneers New AI Models and Streaming Data Techniques for Forecasting Fire and Smoke - NASA Science
SciencePlanetary ScienceAstrophysics & Space ScienceThe Sun & HeliophysicsBiological & Physical SciencesLunar ScienceCitizen ScienceAstromaterialsAeronautics ResearchHuman Space Travel ResearchExploreSearchSubmitNews & EventsMultimediaNASA+5 min readNASA “Wildfire Digital Twin” Pioneers New AI Models and Streaming Data Techniques for Forecasting Fire and SmokeNASA Science Editorial TeamMay 21, 2024ArticleContentsPROJECT LEADSPONSORING ORGANIZATIONNASA’s “Wildfire Digital Twin” project will equip firefighters and wildfire managers with a superior tool for monitoring wildfires and predicting harmful air pollution events and help researchers observe global wildfire trends more precisely.The tool, developed with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office and NASA’s FireSense Program, will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to forecast potential burn paths in real time, merging data from in situ, airborne, and spaceborne sensors to produce global models with high precision.A wildfire simulation describing the spread of PM 2.5 aerosols during a recent controlled burn, generated using the WRF-SFIRE model. “Wildfire Digital Twin” will build on this and other models to simulate active burns with unprecedented resolution. Credit: Kathleen Clough/San Jose State UniversityWhereas current global models describing the spread of wildfires and smoke have a spatial resolution of about 10 kilometers per pixel, the Wildfire Digital Twin would produce regional ensemble models with a spatial resolution of 10-to-30 meters per pixel, an improvement of two orders of magnitude.These models could be generated in a span of mere minutes. By comparison, current global models can take hours to produce.Models with such high spatial resolution produced at this speed would be immensely valuable to first-responders and wildfire managers trying to observe and contain dynamic burns.Milton Halem, a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, leads the Wildfire Digital Twin project, which includes a team of more than 20 researchers from six universities.
Aerosols: Tiny Particles, Big Impact
Volcanoes, for example, eject huge columns of ash into the air, as well as sulfur dioxide and other gases, yielding sulfates. Forest fires send partially burned organic carbon aloft. Certain plants produce gases that react with other substances in the air to yield aerosols, such as the “smoke” in the Great Smoky Mountains of the United States. Likewise in the ocean, some types of microalgae produce a sulfurous gas called dimethylsulfide that can be converted into sulfates in the atmosphere.
Sea salt and dust are two of the most abundant aerosols, as sandstorms whip small pieces of mineral dust from deserts into the atmosphere and wind-driven spray from ocean waves flings sea salt aloft. Both tend to be larger particles than their human-made counterparts.

These scanning electron microscope images (not at the same scale) show the wide variety of aerosol shapes. From left to right: volcanic ash, pollen, sea salt, and soot. [Micrographs courtesy USGS, UMBC (Chere Petty), and Arizona State University (Peter Buseck).]

The remaining 10 percent of aerosols are considered anthropogenic, or human-made, and they come from a variety of sources. Though less abundant than natural forms, anthropogenic aerosols can dominate the air downwind of urban and industrial areas.
Fossil fuel combustion produces large amounts of sulfur dioxide, which reacts with water vapor and other gases in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. Biomass burning, a common method of clearing land and consuming farm waste, yields smoke that’s comprised mainly of organic carbon and black carbon.

Desert dust, volatile organic compounds from vegetation, smoke from forest fires, and volcanic ash are natural sources of aerosols. (Photographs copyright (left to right) Western Sahara Project, Jonathan Jessup, Vox, and Ludie Cochrane.)

Automobiles, incinerators, smelters, and power plants are prolific producers of sulfates, nitrates, black carbon, and other particles. Deforestation, overgrazing, drought, and excessive irrigation can alter the land surface, increasing the rate at which dust aerosols enter the atmosphere.
Drought Fuels Wildfires in the Amazon
They have also observed particularly intense fire activity in September and October in the northern and western Amazon as drought tightened its grip on the region.
Every year, people intentionally light large numbers of fires in the Amazon basin. Often, the goal is to clear forests or manage crops and pastures, though there are an array of other reasons including burning trash or starting cooking fires. Some fires are unintentional ignitions associated with human activity, including discarded cigarettes or sparks from electrical or farming equipment.
In 2023, as researchers forecasted months in advance, the peak of fire season coincided with an ongoing El Niño and a drought in the northern and western part of the basin that worsened the burning. Outbreaks of fire were particularly intense in Amazonas, Para, and Amapá, according to satellite observations. In these areas, drought conditions followed by hot and dry weather have enlarged fires that would have otherwise been unable to spread.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensor on NASA’s Terra satellite captured an image (top of the page) showing smoke streaming from fires burning near Manaus on October 11, 2023. The city, a transportation and manufacturing hub deep in the rainforest, is the capital city of Brazil’s Amazonas state. Smoke from the fires periodically engulfed the city of two million in September and October, at times giving Manaus some of the most polluted skies in the world.

October 11, 2023JPEG

Data from the SERVIR Amazon Fire Dashboard indicates that a mixture of fire types burned in the area at the time. Among them: small clearing and agriculture fires that are used to manage crops, deforestation fires ignited to burn trees that were bull dozed and felled earlier during wet season, and grassland fires used to manage pastures. The system also detected large numbers of understory forest fires, a particularly harmful type of fire that can cause damage that persists for decades.
“Deforestation fires are happening this year as well, but I’m especially worried about the addition of so many understory forest fires associated with the drought,” said Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is a classic response to El Niño.
Tech Today: NASA Helps Find Where the Wildfires Are - NASA
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Forest Stewardship | CAL FIRE
Even a very small change in average temperature can cause far-reaching disruptions in the life cycles of plants and animals. 
Carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2), is one of the major greenhouse gases and the main culprit in global climate change.

Follow the carbon
To understand the problem and its possible solutions we have to follow the carbon. Looking at the world through a carbon lens provides an entirely new perspective on forests. 
Carbon moves through the land, atmosphere, and ocean in a complex cycle. 
Trees and other plants withdraw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and turn it into biomass—trunks, leaves, roots, etc. Animals eat the plants and thereby incorporate carbon into their bodies. 
When plants or animals die, or leaves fall, the process is reversed. The biomass decomposes, and the carbon turns into CO2 and goes back into the atmosphere.
To make this just a bit more complicated, trees, along with all living things, also release CO2 through respiration. In order to figure out how much carbon is actually stored in trees we have to look at the net balance between how much carbon is taken in and how much respired.

Young vs. old
Young, fast-growing trees have a rapid rate of carbon sequestration (uptake and storage of carbon from the atmosphere). They take up more carbon than they lose through respiration, resulting in increased biomass. This rate slows as trees age. Mature forests may become carbon neutral, balanced between sequestration and respiration. However, mature forest ecosystems already contain a huge amount of carbon stored in biomass and soil.

Carbon from the past
There have been periods in the past when photosynthesis exceeded respiration and organic material built up forming coal, oil, and natural gas over millions of years—the “fossil fuels.” When these fuels are extracted and burned for energy this previously stored carbon is released. This is the carbon that is largely responsible for the current increase in greenhouse gases driving global climate change.

Where do forests fit in?
Forest carbon is found in five major areas (called pools): above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, litter, dead wood, and organic carbon in the soil.
Prescribed Fire
It is one of the many tools that can help reduce vegetation (referred to in land management as "fuel loads"), help protect our communities and revitalize our ecosystems. We are implementing a multi-phased approach that includes creating shaded fuel breaks along trails and roads. Shaded fuel breaks clear the understory in wooded areas, creating defensible space for firefighting and control lines for prescribed fires.
Prescribed fire is the purposeful use of fire in an area. It is carefully planned and carried out under specific weather and fuel  moisture conditions called a “prescription”. Prescribed fire reduces the buildup of surface and ladder fuels – which, left untouched, enable fire to climb into the tree canopy and can feed high severity fires that reduce forests to ash. Even with the use of prescribed fire, future wildfires will still occur, but reducing built-up fuel will result in lower-intensity fires. This kind of fire can also help initiate ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling, seed dispersal, germination, reduction of pathogens and protection of mature trees that will continue to sequester carbon and ultimately help protect adjacent communities.
By managing our landscapes with low-intensity prescribed fire, we will reintroduce an element that can make our parks and our communities more resilient to climate change and future wildfires.

More information
If you'd like to learn more about the use of prescribed fire in our parks, visit the links below:
Prescribed Fire: Community Based Burning in California (Video)
Pile Burning in Sonoma County (Video)
Prescribed burns are key to reducing wildfire risk (Press Democrat)
For tribes, 'good fire' a key to restoring nature and people (Press Democrat)
Why are prescribed fires a major tool for preventing forest blazes? (Save The Redwoods League)
Wildfire and Prescribed Burn Emissions (California Air Resources Board)
This Vast Wildfire Lab Is Helping Foresters Prepare for a Hotter Planet (Press Democrat)
Sonoma County Wildfire Protection Plan (Permit Sonoma)
Learning how to garden a forest (Grist)

 

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