ABoVE: Post-Fire Vegetation and Soil Data from NWT Canada, 2017

NASA's ABoVE dataset provides vegetation community characteristics, soil moisture, and biophysical data collected in 2017 from 11 study areas in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It includes data from 28 sites burned by wildfires in 2014 and 2015 and 10 unburned sites, covering peatland and upland areas. The dataset is provided in CSV format and includes digital photographs of vegetation conditions.

Use Cases

• Modeling post-fire vegetation recovery based on burn severity and inventory data.
• Analyzing soil moisture dynamics in burned versus unburned peatland and upland sites.
• Training remote sensing algorithms to detect ground cover and vegetation changes.
• Studying tree and shrub regeneration based on diameter, height, and sprouting cover measurements.

Strengths

• Data from 38 distinct sites (28 burned, 10 unburned) provides a comparative basis.
• Includes multiple data types: field measurements in CSV and supporting site photographs in JPEG.
• Part of a multi-year series, with related data available for 2015-2019.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Field data collection from 10m x 10m plots and subplots.

Time Range

2017

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 19:52:18.748592; freshness should be verified.

Geography

ABoVE Study area, Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada