2012 Colorado Waldo Canyon fire: post-fire database

This data publication contains data collected and derived as part of a joint effort conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the United States Forest Service (USFS) to assess the 2012 Colorado Waldo Canyon Fire (Waldo Canyon Fire). NIST and the USFS participated in the effort as part of the NIST/USFS Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fire Exposure Data Collection and Modeling Project. This data publication contains information on primary structures (e.g., damaged residential wood roofs), vegetation, the timeline of burning features, defensive actions, and general fire direction indicators. These data were derived through a combination of field assessments occurring weeks and months after the fire as well as office assessments of ground and aerial images and videos representing pre-fire, active-fire and post-fire conditions.
The objective of the WUI Fire Exposure Data Collection and Modeling Project is to develop the measurement science needed to mitigate the effects of WUI fires by providing technical guidance on building components, landscaping elements, and community designs that resist ignition and limit the spread of WUI fires. The project's vision is to address structure and community vulnerabilities to WUI fires by developing fire-resistant design and advanced materials based on reliable post-fire data and incorporating findings into codes, standards, and best practices. Post-fire analysis of WUI fires, such as presented in this data package, provides the knowledge to focus experiments and modeling on critical structure and landscape design and materials vulnerabilities. Standard data collection methodologies will also help generate reliable post-fire data. This data package is intended for examination of certain aspects of the Waldo Canyon Fire, particularly the Mountain Shadows Community affected by the Waldo Fire, initially on June 26, 2012. We also presented this file geodatabase as a flexible framework for storing specific data acquired during post-fire assessments. This file geodatabase provides a data model for storing images and eyewitness accounts of active-fire conditions and relating them to features in space and time.
Maranghides et al. (2015) provides an overview of the Waldo Canyon Fire Post-Fire Assessment as well as analysis results. A description of each feature class, table and relationship class present in this geodatabase can be found in \Supplements\DatabaseDescriptions.pdf.