Composite Burn Index (CBI) data and field photos collected for the FIRESEV project, western United States

This set of Composite Burn Index (CBI) data was collected from 2009 to 2011 and supports several products created during the FIRESEV project, which was funded by the Joint Fire Sciences Program. FIRESEV (FIRE SEVerity mapping tools) is a comprehensive set of tools and protocols to deliver, create, and evaluate fire severity maps for all phases of fire management. This CBI data describes fire effects for the western U.S. for five vegetation strata after burning in 2008 to 2010 (Key and Benson 1999). The strata include substrates (litter, duff, fuel, and soil); herbs, low shrubs, and small trees; tall shrubs and sapling trees; intermediate trees; and big trees. The field assessments were conducted in deciduous and coniferous forests, shrublands, and grasslands. The dataset includes information on the fires that burned each area, plot locations and sample protocols, topographic characteristics, canopy characteristics, substrate and ground covers, pre- and post-burn estimates of vegetation in each stratum, estimates of the percentage of plot altered by stratum, CBI values calculated for each of the five strata, and a composite CBI value for the entire plot. Field photos at each location are included for perspective on the field conditions related to the CBI assessments.
These data were collected to support the following major FIRESEV products: (1) a Severe Fire Potential Map (SFPM), which quantified the potential for fires to burn with high severity, should they occur, for any 30 meter (m) x 30 m piece of ground across the western United States (not including Alaska or Hawaii); (2) a fire severity mapping algorithm in the Wildland Fire Assessment Tool (WFAT), which was used to map predicted fire severity explicitly from fire effects simulation models (e.g., the First Order Fire Effects Model, the CONSUME model, and others) for real-time and planning wildfire applications; and (3) a suite of research studies, synthesis papers, and popular articles, which improved the description, interpretation, and mapping of fire severity for wildland fire managers. Our primary purpose for this sampling effort was to collect field data that could be used to assess the accuracy of the maps produced to quantify the probability of severe fires for the western US. In addition, data were collected to analyze the degree to which various measures of burn severity interpreted from satellite imagery (NBR, dNBR, RdNBR) correlated with field indicators of burn severity collected one year post-fire. We sought to assess measures in the field and remotely that related to three different axes of burn severity used in this project. These included 1) soil heating, 2) surface fuel consumption, and 3) change in vegetation cover and mortality. The CBI values comprising this collection were used in each of these products, either directly or indirectly, to compare on-site changes in vegetation, canopy structure, and soil characteristics with fire severity interpretations and assessments derived from satellite imagery. All of the products were based either directly or indirectly on the CBI dataset in this archive.
Original metadata date was 11/19/2013. Minor metadata updates on 12/15/2016.