North American Wildland Fuel Database

The mass of live and dead vegetation, termed biomass, is used in a variety of applications including carbon mapping, wildland smoke emissions modeling, and fire management. In many mapping projects, single biomass values are often used to represent classified vegetation types. However, in reality, the biomass of grasslands, shrublands and forests is extremely variable, and mapped values are associated with a high degree of uncertainty. In this study, we developed a database of wildland fuel biomass (North American Wildland Fuel Database) by major vegetation type (i.e., tree crowns, snags, shrubs, herb, downed wood by size class, litter and duff) in the United States and Canada. This database is a compilation of existing databases and published literature, with wildland fuel biomass converted to a standard unit of measure (megagrams per hectare).
The primary goal of this study is to characterize the inherent variability in wildland fuels and facilitate uncertainty analysis in modeling applications. Published distributions will be useful for informing the first-generation biomass and wildland fuels mapping that incorporates uncertainty estimates by major category. Results of this study also will help inform future sampling needs to better represent the biomass of wildland fuels. Because biomass is a common input in fire and smoke models, uncertainty intervals informed by our database can be used to better understand uncertainty in predictions of wildland fuel consumption and emissions and in regional to national mapping applications for biomass, carbon and emissions inventories.
These data were originally published on 06/21/2019. Minor metadata updates were made on 03/04/2024.