Post-fire Recovery of Soil Organic Layer Carbon in Canadian Boreal Forests, 2015-2018

This dataset provides site moisture, soil organic layer thickness, soil organic carbon, nonvascular plant functional group, stand dominance, ecozone, time-after-fire, jack pine proportion, and deciduous proportion for 511 forested plots spanning ~140,000 km2 across two ecozones of the Northwest Territories, Canada (NWT). The plots were established during 2015-2018 across 41 wildfire scars and unburned areas (no burn history prior to 1965), with 317 plots in the Plains and 194 plots in the Shield regions.

At each plot, two adjacent 30-m transects were established 2 m apart, running north from the plot origin. Soil organic layer (SOL) depth (cm) was measured every 3 m and the mean was taken from the 10 measurements to calculate a plot-level SOL thickness. Three soil organic layer profiles were destructively sampled at 0, 12, and 24 m using a corer that was custom designed for NWT soils.