Field plot measures and fuel treatment units used to assess the effectiveness of (WUI) fuel treatments burned through by the 2007 East Zone and Cascade megafires in central Idaho: 2nd edition

This data publication contains both vector and tabular digital data providing field plot measures and fuel treatment units used to assess the effectiveness of (WUI) fuel treatments burned through by the 2007 East Zone and Cascade megafires in central Idaho. Included are two ArcGIS shapefiles that contain the polygons representing units treated in 2006 for the Secesh Meadows area and the polygons representing the units treated between 1996 and 2006 for the Warm Lake area. Also included are four tabular digital data files. The first data file contains specific fuel treatment and wildfire effects measured and summarized at paired treated and untreated field sites, both immediately post-fire (2007) and one year post-fire (2008). Data fields include site center locations, charred and uncharred ground cover fractions, litter and duff depths, overstory canopy closure, tree and sapling mortality, density, and basal area; tree, sapling and surface fuel biomass; and several other variables. The second data file contains areal percentages of high, moderate, low, and unburned severity classes within wildland-urban interface (WUI) fuel treatment units extracted from immediate post-fire and one-year post-fire Burned Area Reflectance Classification maps (Hudak et al. 2011b). The third file contains the amount of area burned daily for the Secesh Meadows area, Warm Lake area, and the total for the East Zone and Cascade megafires, as summarized from fire progression data (Hudak et al. 2011a). The fourth data file contains individual tree and sapling count observations taken in 2008 at the same 40 paired sites (treated and untreated). Measurements include plot information, tree species, tree condition, tree diameter at breast height (DBH), tree burn characteristics, as well as live and dead sapling species and counts, and stump counts. The individual tree data were used in an individual tree-level analysis of crown fire severity (Klauberg et al. 2019).
These data were collected to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of WUI fuel treatments, designed to protect the local communities of Secesh Meadows and Warm Lake that were burned through by the 2007 East Zone and Cascade megafires, respectively, in central Idaho.
These data are a newer edition of the Hudak et al. (2013, https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0005) data publication. This second edition includes individual tree and sapling data collected in 2008 at the 40 paired sites, which were only summarized at plot level in the first edition. The tree and sapling variables summarized for the first edition have been retained in the second edition.