Fire Behavior Assessment Team: understory vegetation, raw and processed

This data publication contains the raw and processed understory vegetation data for the plots in which pre- and post-fire fuels, and fire behavior data were collected by the Fire Behavior Assessment Team (FBAT) on a subset of wildland fires in the United States from 2003-2017. This subset of the FBAT data is simply the live and dead understory plants including grasses, herbaceous plants, shrubs and seedling trees. Larger trees (those with a diameter at breast height greater than 1 inch) are included in the tree data, and fuel particles not part of rooted plants are in the surface and ground fuels data. FBAT collects pre- and post-fire fuels and tree data along with fire behavior measurements on wildland fires. FBAT is an interagency group of primarily Forest Service employees with both monitoring and fireline qualifications which collects pre- and post-fire fuels and tree data along with fire behavior measurements on wildland fires. Logistics (proximity to instrumentation/crew members), funding, fire activity, and monitoring questions influenced the geographic regions and fires where sampling was attempted, for instance, fuel treatments recorded in the Forest Service Activity Tracking System (FACTS), as well as tree mortality areas, were each targets for FBAT sampling in the past. This data publication includes grass, herbaceous plant, shrub and tree seedling raw and processed data as well as coefficients used to calculate the live and dead biomass of these understory plants.
These data are collected by the FBAT team to provide measures of pre-fire fuels/vegetation, active fire behavior (with sensors in the fire), and post-fire fuels/vegetation conditions during wildfires and prescribed fires for improving understanding and tools related to fire behavior and fire effects.
For more information about FBAT data see: https://www.fs.fed.us/adaptivemanagement/projects_main_fbat.php. These data were published on 10/31/2019. On 12/03/2020 this data publication was updated to include a supplemental file that provides a diagram of the FBAT plot layout and a brief list of key method changes throughout the years FBAT has taken data to present (2020).