New Jersey fuel treatment effects: Pre- and post-burn biometric data

This data publication contains pre- and post-treatment fuel loading data for 22 prescribed burns (RxBs) and 4 wildfires from 2012-2015 in the New Jersey Pinelands, specifically in Ocean and Burlington Counties. The data include: forest floor loading, shrub loading, forest census data, and canopy fuels via a profiling light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system for both before and after fuel reduction treatments. These data were collected as part of a 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. Data are available as either a Microsoft Access database file or as individual comma-delimited ASCII text files.
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 remote sensing methodologies and numeric modeling of fire spread to test the principals and physics behind fuel reduction treatments. These data provide measurements for the evaluation of fuel treatment effects and effectiveness.
Original publication date was 11/14/2017. Minor metadata updates were made on 11/17/2022.