Dataset for 2013 Creek Fire Research Points, Pre- and Post-Fire Data, U.S. Geological Survey
Dates
Publication Date
2018-02-15
Release Date
2018-02-13
Last Update
2017-09
Citation
Petrakis, R.E., Villarreal, M.L., Wu, Zhuoting, Hetzler, Robert, Middleton, B.R., and Norman, L.M., 2018, Dataset for 2013 Creek Fire Research Points, Pre- and Post-Fire Data: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/F7Z31WW4.
Summary
The practice of fire suppression across the western United States over the past century has led to dense forests, and when coupled with drought has contributed to an increase in large and destructive wildfires. Forest management efforts aimed at reducing flammable fuels through various fuel treatments can help to restore frequent fire regimes and increase forest resilience. Our research examines how different fuel treatments influenced burn severity and post-fire vegetative stand dynamics on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, in east-central Arizona, U.S.A. Our methods included the use of multitemporal remote sensing data and cloud computing to evaluate burn severity and post-fire vegetation conditions as well as statistical analyses. [...]
Summary
The practice of fire suppression across the western United States over the past century has led to dense forests, and when coupled with drought has contributed to an increase in large and destructive wildfires. Forest management efforts aimed at reducing flammable fuels through various fuel treatments can help to restore frequent fire regimes and increase forest resilience. Our research examines how different fuel treatments influenced burn severity and post-fire vegetative stand dynamics on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, in east-central Arizona, U.S.A. Our methods included the use of multitemporal remote sensing data and cloud computing to evaluate burn severity and post-fire vegetation conditions as well as statistical analyses. We investigated how forest thinning, commercial harvesting, prescribed burning, and resource benefit burning (managed wildfire) related to satellite measured burn severity (the difference Normalized Burn Ratio – dNBR) following the 2013 Creek Fire and used spectral measures of post-fire stand dynamics to track changes in land surface characteristics (i.e., brightness, greenness and wetness). This dataset includes all of the attribute information for each point, including if the location of the point intersects a treatment type or combination of treatments as well as a KML file showing the location of each point.
Recent forest management has been aimed at providing fuel treatments to reduce density of the vegetation and help restore forest conditions to pre-European settlement times. The data provided in this dataset is based on the locations of points representing ponderosa pine coverage within the Creek Fire, which is the focus fire in this research. Each point includes attribute information including treatment type, the time of the treatment, the coordinate location of the point, the topographic profile at each point, the observed burn severity, and the vegetation response quantified through the Multitemporal Kauth Thomas (MKT) transformation. This spreadsheet was used in the analysis of each treatment to measure the burn severity and overall vegetation response.
