Natalie Krizan

University of Lethbridge

Biography

Natalie Krizan is an MSc Geography student at the University of Lethbridge, supervised by Dr. Laura Chasmer (Western University) and Dr. Raphaël Chavardès (NRCan). She completed her BSc in Environmental Science in 2024. During her final year, she joined the Chasmer lab as an NSERC undergraduate summer research assistant (USRA), conducting a project using time-series RPAS lidar to determine tree fall rates following a high severity fire in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.

Natalie is interested in the impact of altered fuels on fire severity, and in the human and social dimensions of fire. Her MSc project involves using pre- and post-fire airborne laser scanning (lidar) data to assess biomass loss due to combustion from the 2022 Chetamon Fire in Jasper National Park, Alberta. The park has been impacted by a devastating Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic, as well as prolonged fire suppression and exclusion. Modelling stand characteristics and severity of fire impacts for forests with these altered fuel conditions is challenging. This physics-based approach using lidar for biomass modelling provides a solution to overcome those limitations. Natalie is working with LidarForFuel to estimate the difference in canopy fuel load for above-ground biomass loss, and she is modelling below-ground biomass loss using segmentation and predictive machine learning. From this, she will derive estimates of short-term carbon emissions from combustion, and assess the range of variability of impacts from the Chetamon Fire for areas with altered fuels.