Post-fire Recovery of Soil Organic Layer Carbon in Canadian Boreal Forests, 2015-2018

Description

This dataset provides site moisture, soil organic layer thickness, soil organic carbon, nonvascular plant functional group, stand dominance, ecozone, time-after-fire, jack pine proportion, and deciduous proportion for 511 forested plots spanning ~140,000 km2 across two ecozones of the Northwest Territories, Canada (NWT). The plots were established during 2015-2018 across 41 wildfire scars and unburned areas (no burn history prior to 1965), with 317 plots in the Plains and 194 plots in the Shield regions. At each plot, two adjacent 30-m transects were established 2 m apart, running north from the plot origin. Soil organic layer (SOL) depth (cm) was measured every 3 m and the mean was taken from the 10 measurements to calculate a plot-level SOL thickness. Three soil organic layer profiles were destructively sampled at 0, 12, and 24 m using a corer that was custom designed for NWT soils. Within the transects, all stems taller than 1.37 m were identified to species to calculate tree density (stems / m2). Nonvascular plant percent cover was identified to functional group at five, 1-m2 quadrats spaced 6 m apart along the belt transect. A subset of 2,067 of 5,137 total increments from 1,803 profiles from 421 plots were analyzed for total percent C using a CHN analyzer. Time-after-fire was established using fire history records. For older plots where no known fire history is recorded, tree age was used. Data are for the period 2015-06-11 to 2018-08-24 and are provided in comma-separated values (CSV) format.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
21 Search results for publications that cite this dataset by its DOI. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=10.3334%2FORNLDAAC%2F2235
21 ABoVE project site https://above.nasa.gov
21 This link allows direct data access via Earthdata login https://daac.ornl.gov/daacdata/above/Post_Fire_SOC_NWT/
21 ORNL DAAC Data Set Documentation https://daac.ornl.gov/ABOVE/guides/Post_Fire_SOC_NWT.html
21 Data set Landing Page DOI URL https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2235
33 Post-fire Recovery of Soil Organic Layer Carbon in Canadian Boreal Forests, 2015-2018: Post_Fire_SOC_NWT.pdf https://data.ornldaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/public/above/Post_Fire_SOC_NWT/comp/Post_Fire_SOC_NWT.pdf
34 Locations of plots (n =511) in the Northwest Territories, Canada where soil organic layer thickness and total carbon stocks were measured. Plots were sampled along a chronosequence of time-after-fire, stratified by ecozone, and constrained by accessibility. Fire history from 1965-2014 was determined from the fire year associated with mapped fire scars (NWT Centre for Geomatics, 2012). For plots not within any recorded fire, time-after-fire was determined by tree ring analysis. https://daac.ornl.gov/ABOVE/guides/Post_Fire_SOC_NWT_Fig1.png

Tags

  • ecosystems
  • soils
  • land-surface
  • biosphere
  • human-dimensions
  • natural-hazards
  • vegetation
  • ecological-dynamics
  • earth-science

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