In late June 2021, a “heat dome” heatwave event took place in the Pacific Northwest, which brought several days of record high air temperatures to the region’s forests. After this event, citizen scientists logged hundreds of reports describing leaf and needle death on at least 17 species of tree, and an aerial survey of Western Oregon and Southwestern Washington identified more than 220,000 acres of affected, “scorched” forest.

In this project, Adam seeks to better understand where trees were damaged by the heatwave and why. Adam’s research will involve experimentally exposing tree seedlings to heatwave conditions and measuring differences in resulting leaf damage across seedlings with different genotypes and exposed to different pre-heatwave growing conditions. Adam is also developing a map of scorched trees across the Pacific Northwest using high resolution satellite imagery. He will quantify how scorch, a partial die-off of canopy foliage, varies across landscape-scale patterns in topography and environmental conditions. Through these two efforts, Adam plans to build a web tool which creates maps of vulnerability to damage in future heatwaves, to provide insights to partners at the Pacific Northwest Tree Improvement Research Cooperative and the Bureau of Land Management.