Climate is more influential to vegetation green-up than factors that contribute to erosion following high-severity wildfire

Background
In the southwestern United States, post-fire vegetation recovery is increasingly variable in forest burned at high-severity. Many factors, including temperature, drought, and erosion, can reduce post-fire vegetation recovery rates. Here, we examined how post-fire precipitation variability, topography, and soils influenced post-fire vegetation recovery in the southwestern United States as measured by greenness. We modeled relationships between post-fire vegetation and these predictors using Random Forest and examined changes in post-fire normalized burn ratio across fires in Arizona and New Mexico. We incorporated growing season climate to determine if year-of-fire effects were persistent during the subsequent five years or if temperature, water deficit, and precipitation in the years following fire were more influential for vegetation greenness.
Results
We found reductions in post-fire greenness in areas burned at high-severity when heavy and intense precipitation fell on mor..., We used the LANDFIRE Existing Vegetation Type layer (2016) to select ponderosa pine, mixed-conifer, and sub-alpine forests, then selected burned areas using Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) fire perimeters for the period 1985-2017. The MTBS program maps fire severity for fires with a minimum burned area of 404ha (Eidenshink et al. 2007). We only included fires through 2017 to ensure that we had at least five years of post-fire data for all fires in the dataset.
Within each fire perimeter, we aggregated gridded climate data, remotely sensed vegetation metrics, topography, and soil metrics. Unless otherwise stated, the following descriptions refer to pixelwise calculations. We calculated Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) for each fire year -1 to fire year +5 (Eq. 1), which describes both the amount and greenness of vegetation in a pixel. Compared to other metrics such as Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index, NBR is more sensitive to post-fire recovery than other indices (Pickell et ..., , This readme file was generated on 2023-12-04 by Joseph L. Crockett

# GENERAL INFORMATION

## Title of Dataset:

Climate is more influential to vegetation green-up than factors that contribute to erosion following high-severity wildfire

## Author/Principal Investigator Information

Name: Joseph L. Crockett
Institution: University of New Mexico
Address: Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, MSC03 2020, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, United States
Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

## Associate or Co-investigator Contact Information

Name: Matthew D. Hurteau
Institution:University of New Mexico
Address: Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, MSC03 2020, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, United States
Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

## Date of data collection:

2017-2023

## Geographic location of data collection:

New Mexico, Arizona

## Information about funding sources that supported the collection of the data:

United States Departmen...