Geology topics

Adam Young

Publications and source records attributed to Adam Young.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2024

A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation

The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address the negative consequences of contemporary fire use. When applied as a communication and translation tool, there is potential to lower barriers to faster and more successful collaboration among stakeholders. Such improvements are a vital part of strategies to address climate adaptation, wildfire mitigation, and the well-being of ecosystems.

Cell Reports Sustainability↗

USGS2016

Automatic delineation of seacliff limits using lidar-derived high-resolution DEMs in southern California

Seacliff erosion is a serious hazard with implications for coastal management and is often estimated using successive hand-digitized cliff tops or bases (toe) to assess cliff retreat. Even if efforts are made to standardize manual digitizing and eliminate subjectivity, the delineation of cliffs is time-consuming and depends on the analyst's interpretation. An automatic procedure is proposed to extract cliff edges from high-resolution lidar-derived bare-earth digital elevation models, generalized coastal shoreline vectors, and approximate measurements of distance between the shoreline and the cliff top. The method generates orthogonal transects and profiles with a minimum spacing equal to the digital elevation model resolution. The method also extracts the xyz coordinates for each profile for the cliff top and toe, as well as second major inflections along the profile. Over 75% of the automated cliff top points and 78% of the toe automated points are within 95% confidence interval of the hand-digitized top and toe lines, and over 79% of the digitized top points and 84% of the digitized toe points are within the 95% confidence interval of the automated top and toe lines along a stretch of coast in Del Mar, California. Outlier errors were caused by either the failure to remove all vegetation from the bare-earth digital elevation model or errors of interpretation. The automatic method was further applied between Point Conception and Los Angeles Harbor, California. This automatic method is repeatable, takes advantage of detailed topographic information within high-resolution digital elevation models, and is more efficient than hand-digitizing.

California↗

USGS2014

A methodology for assessing the impact of sea level rise on representative military installations in the Southwestern United States (RC-1703)

The objective of the project was to develop an analysis framework and methodologies for evaluation of coastal military installation vulnerabilities and test them under prescribed scenarios of increased local mean sea level over the next century. Methodologies were developed to assess the potential scope and magnitude of impacts from physical effects of flooding, inundation, erosion, seawater intrusion, and alteration of tidal flows. Assessment methodologies targeted potential vulnerabilities of buildings, civil infrastructure, training areas, and waterfront and coastal structures. The project focused on conditions in the southwestern United States and utilized the key coastal military installations at Naval Base Coronado and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton to test the approach.

Report↗