Classification of forest fuels in selected fire-prone ecosystems of Alberta, Canada—implications for crown fire behaviour prediction and fuel management

Key message

We used clustering to construct fuel classes from fuel inventory data based on three stand attributes relevant to crown fire behaviour: surface fuel load (SFL), canopy base height (CBH) and canopy bulk density (CBD). Resulting fuel classes explained more of the stand-to-stand variability in predicted crown fire behaviour than fuel types of the Canadian Forest Fire Behaviour Prediction (FBP) System.

Keywords
Stand structure; Fuel load; Fuel inventory; Fuel complex; Cluster analysis; FBP System; Fire behaviour; Crown fire initiation

Publication
Phelps, N., Beverly, J.L. Classification of forest fuels in selected fire-prone ecosystems of Alberta, Canada—implications for crown fire behaviour prediction and fuel management. Annals of Forest Science 79, 40 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13595-022-01151-x

Data and/or Code availability
Data have been deposited to the Open Science Framework repository: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FZ8E4 and metadata is available at https://metadata-afs.nancy.inra.fr/geonetwork/srv/fre/catalog.search#/metadata/527efb49-43b4-43eb-88b2-70535ff99fc5

Handling Editor
Paulo Fernandes

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