2026-11-03 –, Compagno
The USGS 3DHP surface hydrology program has implications for fire adaptation strategies. This presentation will provide an overview of the assets, a demonstration of post fire applications in GRASS and R, and discussion about the prospects for advanced hydrologic tools.
Increased wildfire activity across the Western United has financial and ecological implications for communities across the region. Individual wildfire events can initiate cascading landscape hazards that impact rural communities, water service providers, downstream water users, and aquatic ecosystems for decades after initial disturbance. Investments in watershed resilience depend on robust public spatial data infrastructure.
Over the next decade the US Geological Survey, its cooperators, and contractors will produce a consistent surface water hydrology dataset using elevation derived hydrography. 3DHP is the USGS implementation of the OGC Hy-features ontology This dataset will replace the deprecated NHD(National Hydrography Dataset). This represents a generational geospatial infrastructure investment and is a component of the nascent “internet of water”. This asset will produce a standardized hydrologically enforced digital elevation model and a reference vector feature. These assets will anchor linear reference systems and provide substantial interoperability between diverse geospatial systems.
This dataset has important implications for prefire planning, active suppression, emergency watershed stabilization, and long term recovery. These are time sensitive periods for post fire watershed hazard mitigation. While many organizations have internal implementations of advanced elevation derived hydrography models, 3DHP will be an important geospatial infrastructure standard that will facilitate interoperability across diverse use cases. The interoperability makes 3DHP an attractive framework for developing new open source analytical capabilities. In this presentation we will review programmatic implications of the 3DHP datasets with an emphasis on applications for forestry, fire and natural resource management.
* Current status of 3DHP development and the process for development of the assets
* Discussion of regional 3DHP projects and their relationship with “investment ready watersheds”and watershed improvement plans.
* Discussion of the data models opportunities and its limitations
* Demonstrate accessing 3DHP assets in R
* Demonstration of upscaling EDH using higher quality USGS QL1 lidar using GRASS.
* Discuss 3DHP fitness for purpose for several natural resource user stories
* Walk through a standard post fire rapid assessment
* Explore pathways to extend the model to meet more advanced user stories
Tim Bailey has worked in a variety of roles developing public interest natural resources spatial data systems. He is a cofounder of Salmon Creek Systems and specializes in lidar and photogrammetric methods for forestry and watershed management.