Currently, our ability to link wildland fire behaviour to fire effects is through the lens of fire severity assessments, because there are no ground-based post-fire metrics that are able to quantitively capture aspects of heat transfer to plants. This presents a particular challenge when considering tree mortality linked to cambial damage, which can occur in both low-intensity surface fires through to high-intensity crown fires. Recent research suggests that measuring the amount of light reflected from charcoals produced by wildland fires will provide information about the energy flux that created the char. We created an experimental forest fire in which we had instrumented individual trees to record the energy delivered to the bark close to the base of the trees. We then assessed the bark charcoal reflectance of the same trees. We found that bark charcoal reflectance showed a strong positive correlation (r² > 0.86, P = 0.0031) with increasing duration of heating and the total energy delivered to the bark. We suggest that this may provide useful quantitative data that can be included in models or post-fire surveys to estimate tree mortality due to cambial kill.

当前，我们将荒野火灾行为与火灾影响联系起来的能力是通过火灾严重性评估的角度来进行的，因为没有基于地面的火灾后指标能够定量地捕获向植物传热的各个方面。在考虑与冈比亚损害相关的树木死亡率时，这会带来特别的挑战，这种危害可能发生在低强度的地面火到高强度的树冠火。最近的研究表明，测量由野火产生的木炭反射的光量将提供有关产生木炭的能量通量的信息。我们创建了一个实验性森林火灾，其中我们对单个树木进行了仪器记录，以记录传递到靠近树木底部的树皮的能量。然后，我们评估了同一棵树的树皮木炭反射率。r ²  > 0.86，P  = 0.0031），随着加热时间的延长和输送至树皮的总能量的增加。我们建议，这可能会提供有用的定量数据，可以将其包含在模型或火灾后调查中，以估计由于冈比亚杀害而造成的树木死亡。