An official website of the United States government
This dataset contains data from adjacent overwintering and single-season burn sites. For the overwintering fires, we targeted locations that had burned in the summers of 2009, smouldered through the winter months, and reignited in 2010. Adjacent to these overwintering sites, we identified single-season burn sites from within portions of the 2009 fires that were unaffected by overwintering. A total of seven overwintering fire sites and four single-season fire sites were sampled. Within each site, three plots were established. Data inlcudes within plot measurments of post-fire seedling composition and density, residual SOL, burn depth estimated by black spruce adventitious roots, thaw depth, and pre-fire tree species composition and estimates of combustion. This is one of three packages from this project; this one contains the soils data.
more »
« less
Overwintering Fires from 2009-2010 Burns near Fairbanks, Alaska: Pre-fire Tree Species Density and Combustion Collected 2023
This dataset contains data from adjacent overwintering and single-season burn sites. For the overwintering fires, we targeted locations that had burned in the summers of 2009, smouldered through the winter months, and reignited in 2010. Adjacent to these overwintering sites, we identified single-season burn sites from within portions of the 2009 fires that were unaffected by overwintering. A total of seven overwintering fire sites and four single-season fire sites were sampled. Data inlcudes within plot measurments of post-fire seedling composition and density, residual SOL, burn depth estimated by black spruce adventitious roots, thaw depth, and pre-fire tree species composition and estimates of combustion. This is one of three packages from this project; this one contains the pre-fire tree species density and combustion data.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10651073
- Publisher / Repository:
- Environmental Data Initiative
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This dataset contains data from adjacent overwintering and single-season burn sites. For the overwintering fires, we targeted locations that had burned in the summers of 2009, smouldered through the winter months, and reignited in 2010. Adjacent to these overwintering sites, we identified single-season burn sites from within portions of the 2009 fires that were unaffected by overwintering. A total of seven overwintering fire sites and four single-season fire sites were sampled. Within each site, three plots were established. Data inlcudes within plot measurments of post-fire seedling composition and density, residual SOL, burn depth estimated by black spruce adventitious roots, thaw depth, and pre-fire tree species composition and estimates of combustion. This is one of three packages from this project; this one contains the seedling recruitment data.more » « less
-
Hui, Dafeng (Ed.)Wildfire frequency and extent is increasing throughout the boreal forest-tundra ecotone as climate warms. Understanding the impacts of wildfire throughout this ecotone is required to make predictions of the rate and magnitude of changes in boreal-tundra landcover, its future flammability, and associated feedbacks to the global carbon (C) cycle and climate. We studied 48 sites spanning a gradient from tundra to low-density spruce stands that were burned in an extensive 2013 wildfire on the north slope of the Alaska Range in Denali National Park and Preserve, central Alaska. We assessed wildfire severity and C emissions, and determined the impacts of severity on understory vegetation composition, conifer tree recruitment, and active layer thickness (ALT). We also assessed conifer seed rain and used a seeding experiment to determine factors controlling post-fire tree regeneration. We found that an average of 2.18 ± 1.13 Kg C m -2 was emitted from this fire, almost 95% of which came from burning of the organic soil. On average, burn depth of the organic soil was 10.6 ± 4.5 cm and both burn depth and total C combusted increased with pre-fire conifer density. Sites with higher pre-fire conifer density were also located at warmer and drier landscape positions and associated with increased ALT post-fire, greater changes in pre- and post-fire understory vegetation communities, and higher post-fire boreal tree recruitment. Our seed rain observations and seeding experiment indicate that the recruitment potential of conifer trees is limited by seed availability in this forest-tundra ecotone. We conclude that the expected climate-induced forest infilling (i.e. increased density) at the forest-tundra ecotone could increase fire severity, but this infilling is unlikely to occur without increases in the availability of viable seed.more » « less
-
Tundra environments in Alaska are experiencing elevated levels of wildfire, and the frequency is expected to keep increasing due to rapid warming of the Arctic. Because of large amounts of carbon stored in permafrost soils, tundra wildfires may release significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere that ultimately influence the Earth’s radiative balance. Therefore, accounting for the amount of carbon released from tundra wildfires is important for understanding the trajectory of climate change. We collected data in the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta during the summer of 2019 for the purpose of determining organic matter and carbon lost during the 2015 fire season. Organic matter and carbon lost from combustion were determined by combining burn depth measurements with organic matter and carbon content measurements from unburned tundra. Burn depth measurements were taken opportunistically across different levels of burn severity. Three vegetative markers, Sphagnum fuscum, Eriophorum, and Dicranum spp., that survived the fire event were used to measure the difference between the pre and post fire soil height in unburned and burned areas respectively, defined here as burn depth. All burn depth measurements are accompanied with coordinate locations so that they can ground truth and be upscaled by remote sensing data of burn severity. Organic matter and carbon content of the dense live vegetation layer and fibric soil layer were measured in the lab from vegetation and soil cores taken from four different sites in unburned tundra areas.more » « less
-
This dataset provides annual gridded estimates of fire locations and associated burn fraction per pixel for Alaska and Canada at approximately 500 meter (m) spatial resolution for the period 2001-2019. Gridded predictions of carbon combustion and burn depth for the same period within the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) extended domain using the burn area maps and field data are also available. Fire locations and date of burn (DOB) were detected by MODIS-derived active fire products. Burned area was primarily estimated from finer-scale Landsat imagery using a differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) algorithm and upscaled to an approximate 500 m MODIS resolution. Aboveground combustion, belowground combustion, and burn depth were statistically modeled at the pixel level for every mapped burned pixel in the ABoVE extended domain based on field observations across Alaska and western Canada. Predictor variables included remotely sensed indicators of fire severity, topography, soils, climate, and fire weather. Quality flags for burned area and combustion are available. Fire is the dominant disturbance agent in Alaskan and Canadian boreal ecosystems and releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. These data are useful for studies of disturbance, fire ecology, and carbon cycling in boreal ecosystems.more » « less
