RxCADRE 2012: Terrestrial laser scan (TLS) point cloud data for Eglin Air Force Base

The RxCADRE project was a large integrated measurements experiment that involved 30 leading fire scientists across 6 fire disciplines to collaboratively collect various data on 7 large operational prescribed fires in 2008 and 2011 at the Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County, Florida and the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center in Georgia. In 2012 the project was extended by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) to include 6 small replicate and 3 large operational prescribed burn blocks in longleaf pine ecosystems on Eglin Air Force Base. These data were collected in the L1G (grass dominated), L2G (grass/shrub dominated units) and the L2F (forested units) as part of the 2012 large operational prescribed fires. This data publication contains raw terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data (provided in LAZ format) collected in 2012 at Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County, Florida. The L2F unit was the last unit burned as part of the 2012 Prescribed Fire Combustion and Atmospheric Dynamics Research Experiment (RxCADRE) funded by the Joint Fire Science Program. Data include UTM coordinates, normalized height, and raw intensity data that correspond to the 3 Highly Instrumented Plots (HIPS) from the 2012 RxCADRE burn.
The 2012 RxCADRE, and subsequent 2019 and 2020 Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) projects, were developed to respond to the need for integrated, quality-assured fuels, atmospheric, fire behavior, energy, smoke and effects measurement datasets for calibrating and validating fire and smoke models and tackle fundamental fire science questions. A goal of these projects is to provide quality-assured data in a public database to promote data sharing and usage between scientists, managers and anyone who wants them. These TLS data could be used for several fuel or fire applications, such as estimating canopy- or crown-level fuels as exemplified in Rocha et al. (2023), or for running fire behavior simulations, particularly with computational fluid dynamic modeling of fire behavior that uses the spatial distribution of trees to account for the drag on airflow.
A short summary of the RxCADRE project can be found in the full data product download (\Supplements\RxCADRE_Project_Overview.pdf). Information about the RxCADRE project can also be found here: https://www.fs.usda.gov/pnw/fera/research/rxcadre/. For more information about these data, see Rocha et al. (2023).