Impacts of Wildfires on Boreal Forest Ecosystem Carbon Dynamics

This dataset contains simulations of net primary production (NPP), heterotrophic respiration (RH), net ecosystem production (NEP), and soil temperature data in North American boreal forests for the period 1986-2020. Data sources included historical fire sources and Landsat data. The delta Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), which can be used to represent burn severity for a fire, was calculated for each individual fire over the time period. The interactions between canopy, fire and soil thermal dynamics were modelled using a soil surface energy balance model incorporated into a previous Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM). Using the revised TEM, two regional simulations were conducted with and without fire disturbance. Fire polygons were dissected into each unit with unique fire history and then intersected with each grid cell to measure fire impacts. The output values for each grid cell are the area-weighted mean of each fire polygon and unburned area within the cell. Two extra simulations without a canopy energy balance scheme were also conducted to quantify the impact of the canopy. Soil temperature was simulated with and without the canopy energy balance scheme in the model in addition to considering fire impacts.