BOREAS FLX-04: Post-Fire Carbon Flux in Black Spruce Forests

Four black spruce forest sites burned in 1930, 1964, 1981, and 1989 provide a rare temporal sequence for studying boreal wildfire recovery. Paired portable eddy flux systems collected 4-6 weeks of peak-season data at each site in 1999 or 2000, measuring carbon, water, and energy exchanges. This data is part of a larger age-sequence study aiming for year-round measurements across seven sites spanning 2 to 150 years post-fire.

Use Cases

• Modeling post-fire carbon sequestration trajectories based on stand age.
• Analyzing relationships between meteorological variables and ecosystem fluxes during the growing season.
• Calibrating remote sensing products for boreal forest recovery using ground-truth flux data.
• Studying the resilience of black spruce forests to stand-replacing disturbances over decades.

Strengths

• Provides a controlled temporal sequence of sites with known fire years (1930, 1964, 1981, 1989).
• Data collection targeted the peak growing season (June-September) for ecologically relevant flux measurements.
• Cross-platform presence (Data.gov, NASA EarthData) indicates established use in the scientific community.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low: specific column names, row counts, and file sizes are not provided.
• Temporal coverage is limited to short, seasonal snapshots (4-6 weeks per site) rather than continuous annual data.
• Conflicting 'last updated' dates (2000 vs. 2026) create uncertainty about metadata maintenance.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Field measurements using paired portable solar-powered eddy covariance flux systems.

Time Range

1999-2000 (collection), with referenced fire history from 1930-1989.

Freshness

2026-03-13 12:42:29.227069

Geography

Northern Study Area (NSA), likely in the North American boreal forest.