New Jersey fuel treatment effects: Leaf-off airborne LiDAR data

This data publication contains airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data collected as part of a 2012-2015 Joint Fire Science Program project designed to collect landscape-scale fuels data before and after prescribed fires to quantify consumption, collect data for the parameterization and evaluation of computational flow-dynamics models for simulating fire behavior, and synthesize data for the evaluation of fuels treatment effectiveness. The data include four temporally distinct, leaf-off, airborne laser scanner collections in the New Jersey Pinelands, specifically Burlington and Ocean Counties. The first acquisition, Phase 1, serves as a base-line dataset for over 700 square miles of the New Jersey Pinelands and was collected in the fall of 2012. Phase 2, was collected in the spring of 2013 and focuses only on smaller areas of interest within the boundaries of Phase I where there were new fuel treatment operations. Phase 3, collected in the spring, focuses on the re-measurement of 2013 treatments and new 2014 treatments. Phase 4, collected in the spring of 2015, focused on a single prescribed burn block, Ex1.
The data provided here were collected as part of the Joint Fire Science funded project: “Evaluation and Optimization of Fuel Treatment Effectiveness with an Integrated Experimental/Modeling Approach.” From 2001-2011, approximately US $5.6 billion was spent on hazardous fuel reduction to treat an average of approximately 2.5 million acres per year across the United States. Because of the cost and complexity involved, there is a need for implementing treatments in such a way that hazard mitigation, or other management objectives, are optimized. Our work integrated extensive forest census measurements, remote sensing methodologies, three highly-instrumented fuel reduction treatments, and numeric modeling of fire spread to test the principals and physics behind fuel reduction treatments. These datasets provide measurements for the evaluation of fuel treatment effects and effectiveness.
Original publication date was 02/13/2018. Minor metadata updates were made on 11/17/2022.