Sharpsand Creek Experimental Forest Fire Data

Data rescue intern: Mannfred Masahiro Asada Boehm

Sharpsand Creek is located approximately 60 km north of Thessalon, Ontario. Within this area of Crown Land, extensive wildfire research was undertaken by Brian Stocks and Doug McRae (Canadian Forest Service) from the 1970’s to early 1990’s. The oldest data in the Sharpsand Creek data set is 50 years old, with the most significant data coming from prescribed wildfire-research burns. Data collected includes pre-burn forest inventories, fire behaviour data, and post fire site analysis on regeneration, soils, and vegetation. These experimental burns generated a wealth of data, some of which have resulted in influential papers in the wildland fire literature. Other data have, until recently, remained undigitized and not available to the public. The types of large-scale experimental burns at Sharpsand Creek are very unlikely to occur today because of the risk involved.

Since the 1990’s research at Sharpsand Creek has transitioned from experimental burning to the study of duff (forest floor detritus) moisture dynamics.  These studies continue to inform the creation and revision of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS), a national system of models to support wildland fire decision making.  The data collected includes destructive sampling of duff to quantify effects on bulk density and in-stand climate variables (air temperature, relative humidity, wind, rain, soil temp, soil moisture, and solar radiation).

Reviewing and mining the historic data from Sharpsand Creek is invaluable for enhancing current wildfire research. Thus, researchers at the Canadian Forest Service are continuing to find, digitize, and database all known studies that have taken place at Sharpsand Creek. The growing database now has over 600 entries, which includes 700 images capturing wildfire dynamics which were previously not attributed to any specific project. Over the course of my LDP internship, I wrote a series of scripts to automate the annotation and sorting of these data into a hierarchical and chronological folder structure. This has allowed the Canadian Forest Service to finally integrate these historic data as it develops the next generation of the CFFDRS. The scripts, and a subset of the sorted data, are housed on the Open Science Framework project: https://osf.io/2np87/ .