Waterfowl Counts and Wildfire Burn Data from the Western Boreal Forest of North America, 1955-2014

The project utilized data from the Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey, which is an annual survey conducted since 1955 by the governments of the United States and Canada to monitor waterfowl populations. These survey data were spatially and temporally layered onto long-term databases of fire perimeters for Alaska and western Canada, providing a record of waterfowl transects which had burned over the last 60 years. The project modelled abundance of dabbler and diver pairs in relation to time since fire, looking at short-term (e.g., 1–3 years) versus long-term timeframes (e.g., >5 years), and in relation to fire extent, defined as the percent of transect which had burned.