Boreal Forest Carbon and Burn Data from 2014 Wildfires, NWT Canada

211 burned forest plots were established in the Northwest Territories of Canada following 2014 wildfires. The dataset, provided by NASA, includes detailed analysis of 32 black spruce-dominated plots, with measurements of soil carbon content, radiocarbon values, tree density, and pre-fire carbon pool estimates. Fieldwork was conducted in 2015 to assess legacy carbon combustion across a moisture gradient.

Use Cases

• Modeling post-fire carbon emissions based on soil profile carbon and radiocarbon data.
• Analyzing the relationship between forest stand age and wildfire carbon loss based on tree-ring counts.
• Assessing landscape-scale carbon pool variability using plot-level moisture, slope, and aspect observations.
• Estimating the contribution of young forests to total burned area based on the provided stand age metric.

Strengths

• Data is based on 211 physically established field plots, providing ground-truthed measurements.
• Includes specific radiocarbon (14C) analysis at depth increments to assess legacy carbon.
• Covers a full moisture gradient from xeric to sub-hygric conditions across the landscape.
• Provides estimates of pre-fire above and belowground carbon pools for comparison.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset scale are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to the specific 2014 fire event and 2015 sampling.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Field data collection from established plots, including soil core analysis and tree-ring counts.

Time Range

2014-2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 22:03:39.073772; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Boreal forests in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada