Roadmap

Status: Beta — Methodology

The Disturbance Severity tool is operational and in active use with NPS partners.

Current capabilities:

• Generate severity maps within days of a fire, given cloud-free imagery
• Provide Relativized Burn Ratio (RBR) appropriate for low-biomass environments, alongside absolute metrics (dNBR)
• Link severity to vegetation community data for impact reporting
• Output cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs for downstream use

Development history:

• Initial development driven by partner need for faster severity assessments tuned for desert environments
• Partners were receiving dNBR from federal agencies but needed RBR for low-biomass landscapes

Status: Beta — Methodology | josh Website

The josh simulation engine is complete and functional. Current work focuses on model development and parameterization for specific vegetation communities.

Current capabilities:

• Domain-specific language for specifying organisms, life stages, demographic rates, and environmental interactions
• Runs in browser for small simulations, scales to cloud computing for landscape-level analysis
• Transparent models that ecologists can inspect, critique, and modify

In progress:

• Model parameterization and validation for Mojave Desert vegetation communities
• Integration with Disturbance Severity outputs (automatic loading of severity rasters)
• Climate scenario incorporation

Next steps:

• Complete baseline Joshua tree community model
• Parameterize fire response and management intervention effects
• Validation against available monitoring data

Status: In Design — Methodology

Resource Optimization will sit between manager intent and vegetation modeling, helping structure and compare intervention strategies.

Planned capabilities:

• Translate management constraints (seed availability, labor, budget, logistics) into simulation specifications
• Drive josh to run appropriate scenarios (many replicates, multiple strategies)
• Structure side-by-side comparison of projected outcomes
• Surface tradeoffs between cost, effort, and ecological outcomes

Design considerations:

• How to specify constraints in a flexible but structured way
• What output metrics best support manager decision-making
• How to present uncertainty in strategy comparisons

We want input: If you have experience with post-fire resource allocation or ideas about scenario comparison, please contact us.

Status: Long-term

This component will close the feedback loop by comparing predictions to outcomes and updating models accordingly.

Planned approaches:

• Remote sensing validation: track whether recovery trajectories match projections
• Long-term monitoring integration: field data to validate abundance predictions
• Model updating: when observations diverge from predictions, feed back into parameterization

We are committed to developing validation approaches because adaptive management requires knowing whether interventions achieved their intended effects.