Impacts of Wildfires on Boreal Forest Ecosystem Carbon Dynamics

Data sources included historical fire sources and Landsat data. The delta Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), which can be used to represent burn severity for a fire, was calculated for each individual fire over the time period.

The interactions between canopy, fire and soil thermal dynamics were modelled using a soil surface energy balance model incorporated into a previous Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM). Using the revised TEM, two regional simulations were conducted with and without fire disturbance. Fire polygons were dissected into each unit with unique fire history and then intersected with each grid cell to measure fire impacts.