2025 WA GIS Conference

We present a newly-created environmental dataset for storing fire history information gathered from trees in the Spokane, Washington area. The data come from fire scars preserved on trees after they have been injured in fires of the past – collecting both the quantity and timing of these scars can give a wealth of information on past fire activity, in addition to the spatial patterns gathered from the tree locations. This dataset is designed to be an ongoing collection of fire history data, with contributions from students and community members. Not only is the dataset one of exceptionally high resolution, but it is also the only effort to create a complete inventory of all the fire-scarred trees in Riverside State Park, which is the largest state park in Washington State. These data will be used in teaching activities through GIS labs on things like interpolations and hot spot analyses, but also to record the geospatial nature of past fire activity for an area at a scale not yet pursued before. We propose a presentation where we introduce the idea of fire history and fire-scar data, explore the dataset as it exists now and discuss the student work involved in creating in, and showcase some potential future uses of the dataset as it grows in feature and attribute depth. Currently the dataset is housed on the Eastern Washington University AGOL content page, but the goal is to make it public and shareable via an interactive ESRI StoryMap.