Landscape Simulator (LSim) replicate data resulting from the use of wildfire as a management strategy to restore resiliency to ponderosa pine forests in the southwest United States

Simulation modeling was used to examine long-term tradeoffs and synergies of alternative land management strategies by combining two wildfire management alternatives with three levels of contemporary forest restoration treatments on a 778,000-hectare landscape over 56 years (2022-2078) using data from 2000-2019. Forest Service lands within the study area where restoration treatments are allowed, include 237,218 hectares across the Kaibab and Coconino National Forests. The data within this package are either produced by the Landscape Simulator (LSim) for these forested lands or used to summarize or visualize these data. The foundation of the simulated data is built around forest growth and mortality simulations for forest stands via the Forest Vegetation Simulator, and wildfire activity via the large Fire Simulator. These simulated data include a temporal accounting of forest stands treated by mechanical thinning and prescribed fire and burned by wildfire; tree stand characteristics by tree species (trees per acre; basal area, etc.), and fire-induced mortality, as well as wildfire polygons complete with wildfire characteristics. Data needed to summarize the simulated data include stand characteristics, and a record of which tree stands were included within our study area, as well as a spatial representation of planning areas used to clip wildfire polygons. Spatial data included for visualization are planning area polygons and tree stand polygons.
To assess tradeoffs and synergies between traditional forest restoration and managing wildfire to meet resource objectives.
For more information about this study and these data, see Young et al. (2022). Summary data used to produce figures for Young et al. (2022) are also included in this data package. These data were published on 02/03/2022. On 06/22/2023 minor metadata updates were made.