Meet the Users is a NESDIS User Engagement speaker series which invites end users in society to share their thematic uses of NOAA data, products and services. This series is an opportunity to bring awareness to the opportunities, benefits, and impact NOAA data has in society.
Karen Gaffney (North Coast Resource Partnership) and her partners, Kass Green (Kass Green & Associates) and Mark Tukman (Tukman Geospatial) work together to focus and implement information that supports investments in forest health, water quality, and economic development in the North Coast Region of California The North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP) brings together North Coast Tribes, counties, and private, nongovernmental, and municipal stakeholders to enhance the quality of life for tribal and other communities in the North Coast Region. The partnership develops regional plans that incorporate science and data related to watershed and community health, and include strategies informed by local expertise, knowledge, and priorities. The regional plans use remote sensing and other datasets to screen and prioritize the landscape for activities like fuel reduction and bioenergy generation. Satellite data from the Landsat and Sentinel programs are critical to NCRP’s work, as is NOAA weather data for analysis of extreme fire weather potential across the North Coast landscape.
Karen Gaffney has spent her career in conservation planning in Northern California. For the past 18 years, Karen has managed the North Coast Resource Partnership, which brings together tribes, counties, and private, nongovernmental, and municipal stakeholders to enhance the quality of life for tribal communities in the North Coast Region in the face of a changing climate.
This talk will cover one of the North Coast’s priorities, which is to incorporate satellite information into the local culture and context of the North Coast to develop fine-scale decision-support maps that assist in identifying areas with a high likelihood of extreme fire weather.
To learn more about how Karen and the North Coast are working towards the Pathfinder Initiative, please contact noaa.pathfinderinitiative@noaa.gov.