U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

icon-dot-gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

icon-https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Fuels Data for the 2000 Jasper Fire in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Collected in 2023-2025 (ver. 2.0 January 2026)

Post-fire vegetation structure and fuel data are needed to understand how an area recovers over time. To address this need, data were collected within the perimeter of the 2000 Jasper Fire near Custer, SD, on 73 plots co-located with plots previously established by scientists to assess burn severity. Vegetation structure data were collected at these plots during two periods: July 11–17, 2023, and May 31–June 28, 2024. In 2023, the vegetation and fuel data were collected on 30 m diameter plots. For greater efficiency, the plots were reduced to 20 m diameter for the 2024 data collection. The plots were originally established in 2002 to collect, composite burn index (CBI) data to validate burn severity products derived from Landsat. Plots were located at least 90 m apart and distanced from roads, ensuring a stratified representation of burn severity. The 2023-2024 field campaign revisited these plots to assess long-term trends in vegetation recovery and fuel status following the Jasper fire (Chen et al., 2011; Picotte et al., 2021; U.S. Geological Survey, 2022). The research team measured and/or recorded a suite of vegetation and fuel metrics at the tree, transect, and plot level. In addition to conventional field measurements, terrestrial lidar data were also collected at each of the plots. This data release includes a shapefile of plot locations, spreadsheets in comma-separated values (CSV) format of the recorded measurements and point clouds in the lidar data exchange (las) file format for the terrestrial lidar data. The data and metadata were revised in January 2026 to include additional terrestrial lidar scans of 12 of the pre-existing plots. These scans were taken in June 2025 to supplement those from 2024, due to difficulties encountered during the IntELiMon intake process. Specific details can be found in the included revision history.txt file.

Get Data and Metadata
Author(s) Hazel R Mebius, Katelyn E Woolfrey, Grace E Parrott, Birgit Peterson orcid, Joshua J Picotte orcid, Christopher N Woody orcid
Publication Date 2025-02-24
Beginning Date of Data 2023-07-11
Ending Date of Data 2025-06-23
Data Contact
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/P1PEKZPH
Citation Mebius, H.R., Woolfrey, K.E., Parrott, G.E., Peterson, B., Picotte, J.J., and Woody, C.N., 2025, Fuels Data for the 2000 Jasper Fire in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Collected in 2023-2025 (ver. 2.0 January 2026): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P1PEKZPH.
Metadata Contact
Metadata Date 2026-01-22
Related Publication
Citations of these data

Loading https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2010.524678

Access public
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Loading...
Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2026-02-06T05:01:48.777Z