A geospatial dataset providing first-order indicators of wildfire risks to water supply in Canada and Alaska

• Main Author: François-Nicolas Robinne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2020-04-01
• Series: Data in Brief
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340920300652

First-order, high level indicators of wildfire risk to water resources are paramount to understand growing wildfire-related water security challenges in Canada and Alaska. Information pertaining to forest cover, fire activity, water availability, and location of populated places was collected from multiple institutional sources. Manual and semi-automated processes were used to clean disparate source data and create four harmonized geospatial layers whose content was summarized for each of the 1468 existing sub-sub watersheds covering Alaska and Canada. The final dataset provides a master layer based on sub-sub-watershed boundaries that contains relevant information to create spatial indicators of wildfire risk to water security. These can be used to identify potentially at-risk regions in high-latitude watersheds of North America. The dataset can be further used within a larger, general risk assessment framework considering other environmental stressors to water security, including climate change and population growth. The dataset described herein was used to make a figure in the manuscript “Wildfire impacts on hydrologic ecosystem services in North American high-latitude forests: A scoping review” by Robinne et al. [1]. Keywords: Wildfires, Water supplies, Ecosystem services, Post-fire hydrology, Forest watershed, Watershed disturbance