First-order indicators of wildfire risks to water supply in Canada and Alaska

First-order, high level indicators of wildfire risk to water resources are paramount to grasp current wildfire-related water security challenges in Canada and Alaska. Information pertaining to forest cover, fire activity, water availability, and location of populated places was collected from multiple institutional sources. Manual and semi-automated processes were used to clean disparate source data and create four harmonized geospatial layers whose content was summarized for each of the 1468 existing sub-sub watersheds covering Alaska and Canada. The final dataset provides a master layer based on watershed boundaries, which contains relevant information to create spatial indicators of wildfire risk to water security. These can be used to identify potentially at-risk regions in high-latitude watersheds of North America. The dataset can be further used within a larger, general risk assessment framework taking into account other environmental stressors to water security, including climate change and population growth. The dataset described herein was used to make a figure in the manuscript “Wildfire impacts on hydrologic ecosystem services in North American high-latitude forests: A scoping review” by Robinne et al. (2019, In review)

在加拿大和阿拉斯加，掌握针对水资源的第一性、高层次野火风险的指标对于理解当前与野火相关的水资源安全挑战至关重要。数据集收集了来自多个机构来源的关于森林覆盖率、火灾活动、水资源可用性和人口居住地位置的信息。通过手动和半自动流程对来源数据进行清洗，并创建了四个协调一致的地理空间层，其内容被总结为涵盖阿拉斯加和加拿大的1468个现有次次流域。最终数据集基于流域边界提供了一个主层，其中包含有关创建野火对水资源安全空间指标的相关信息。这些指标可用于识别北美高纬度流域中可能面临风险的区域。该数据集还可以在考虑其他环境压力因素，如气候变化和人口增长的大规模风险评估框架中使用。本描述的数据集被用于制作 Robinne 等人（2019年，待发表）论文《北美高纬度森林野火对水文生态系统服务的影响：一项范围审查》中的图表。