Fire and tree mortality database (FTM): 2nd edition

The Fire and Tree Mortality (FTM) database includes standardized observations of fire injury and survival or mortality for 171,177 individual tree-level observations, representing 142 tree species across the United States. Of these, 7,191 trees have burned twice. These trees were burned in 420 prescribed fires and wildfires occurring in 35 years, from 1981 to 2016. The database was developed using 41 contributed datasets from researchers, managers, and archived data products. At a minimum, datasets had to contain measurements of individual trees, size, fire injury, and post-fire survival, but some datasets include additional data such as bark beetle attack. Only trees that were alive before the fire were included in the database. We included any trees where post-fire status was measured within 10 years of the fire. If a tree re-burned in a subsequent fire, and post-fire injury and status information were available after that fire, then a new record (row) was made for that tree after the second fire.
The purpose of the FTM database is to provide access to data on individual tree mortality or top-kill from wildland and prescribed fire. By pooling as many individual datasets as possible and creating consistent variables, data analysis with a much larger sample size is feasible. The FTM database also allows easy identification of data gaps to direct future data collection efforts. The FTM database also allows evaluation of post-fire mortality models, such as the First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM), BehavePlus, and the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FFE-FVS).
This data publication is a 2nd edition of the FTM database. The first edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2020-0001) was originally published on 05/14/2020. This 2nd edition includes data updates such as a change to the format of live / dead status for years where data were not collected in the field, updates to the format of unobserved (NA) values, and additional data corrections. A thorough description of these updates is described in the process steps below.