Deadwood_PRA: Decision Support Tool for Assessing the Protective Effect of Lying Deadwood Against Snow Avalanche Release
Deadwood_PRA computes fuzzy snow avalanche release membership and assesses the protective effect of lying deadwood-dominated forest areas using UAV-derived data. The tool is specifically designed for disturbed mountain forests, where lying deadwood substantially influences surface roughness and thereby the likelihood of avalanche release.
The automated workflow integrates terrain information, deadwood structure, and canopy coverage of standing trees to generate spatially explicit fuzzy membership maps. The analysis requires only a dense point cloud, ideally derived from UAV photogrammetry or ULS data, together with a reference DTM.
To successfully run the provided R code, the folder structure and input paths must be adjusted accordingly before execution.
Authors: Leon Buehrle, Michaela Teich
Year: 2026
Contact: Leon Buehrle – leon.buehrle@t-online.de
Michaela Teich – michaela.teich@bfw.gv.at
For testing the code, we provide the following datasets:
Test raw data study site Kals (point clouds): Zenodo Dataset Kals
Test raw data study sites Franza/Col di Lana (point clouds): Zenodo Dataset Franza/Col di Lana
Test raw data study sites Caore/Molina (point clouds): Zenodo Dataset Caore/Molina
Results (calculated with default settings): Zenodo Results
Due to data restrictions we cannot provide the required reference DTM.
Users are referred to the official regional data provider.
For the study area Kals am Großglockner, the reference_DTM can be downloaded here:
TIRIS Data Portal
For details, we refer to the corresponding publication: Bührle, L. J., Baggio, T., Winiwarter, L., Adams, M., Lingua, E., Richter, P., Schulte, F., Holstein, K., Bebi, P., Marke, T., & Teich, M. (in prep.). A spatially explicit UAV-based decision support tool to assess the protective effect of lying deadwood on snow avalanche release.
Shield:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
