Wildfire Biogeochemical Impacts Over Four Millennia in a Rocky Mountain Watershed

Data and code from Dunnette et al. 2014 supports analysis of wildfire impacts on biogeochemistry over four millennia in a Rocky Mountain subalpine watershed. The archive includes 49 files totaling 23 MB, with data primarily in .csv and .xls formats and analysis scripts written for MATLAB. The work was authored by Philip E. Higuera and colleagues and published in New Phytologist.

Use Cases

• Reproduce the statistical analyses of wildfire impacts on biogeochemical cycles based on the provided MATLAB scripts.
• Analyze long-term sediment core data to understand fire history and its environmental effects.
• Model relationships between wildfire events and elemental concentrations over a 4000-year period.

Strengths

• Includes 49 files with both data and fully commented analysis scripts, facilitating reproducibility.
• Covers a temporal scale of four millennia, providing a long-term perspective on wildfire impacts.
• Data is provided in common formats (.csv, .xls) and scripts specify required MATLAB toolboxes.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific modeling tasks.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Dunnette, P.V., P.E. Higuera, K.K. McLauchlan, K.M. Derr, C.E. Briles, and M.H. Keefe. 2014. New Phytologist.

Collection Method

Data likely derived from sediment core analysis in a subalpine watershed, as described in the associated paper.

Time Range

Covers four millennia (approximately 4000 years) of paleoecological record.

Geography

Rocky Mountain subalpine watershed.