The Wildland Almanac - Treatment Scenarios: a 30 m land management "what-if" companion to Wildland Almanac – Western CONUS for forests, shrublands, and grasslands. Considers 24 alternative forest and fuel treatment types, and provides raster predictions of the conditions expected in the first year after treatment. Conditions include evapotranspiration, gross primary production, aboveground biomass, drought-driven dieoff risk, and fire hazard (flame length and rate of spread). Predictions are anchored to the observed 2024 baseline conditions in the Wildland Almanac. Created using a unified methodology that emphasizes past-to-future and cross-property consistency, with the goal of creating an integrated framework that supports both planning and tracking progress. Designed and built in collaboration with https://www.blueforest.org/. Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs with a STAC catalog. CC BY 4.0.
A counterfactual ("what-if") companion to the Wildland Almanac: for each of 24 generic forest and fuel treatments, the ecosystem condition that would be expected if that treatment were applied to the observed 2024 landscape, across the western conterminous United States at 30 m. Four cover-driven properties - potential evapotranspiration, productivity, biomass, and drought-dieoff risk - plus two treated fire-behavior layers: flame length and rate of spread. Every layer is modeled, not observed; the Undisturbed treatment reproduces the observed Wildland Almanac exactly.
Current release: v2026.1 (June 2026). Western CONUS, a single 2024 baseline water year, 24 treatments, EPSG:5070, 30 m. Released under CC BY 4.0.
These are scenarios, not observations. This dataset acts on the observed Wildland Almanac - the measured baseline at
source.coop/wildland-almanac/conus(and the annual California release atsource.coop/wildland-almanac/california) - applying a fixed library of generic treatments to the 2024 condition. The treatments are uniform intensities, not site-specific prescriptions, and no treatment is asserted to have occurred anywhere. Use the layers to compare treatments and screen where effects are large, not as predictions for a specific project. See the documentation PDF for the full caveats.
v2026.1/ - the data files (144 COGs across six layer directories)WildlandAlmanac_TreatmentScenarios_Documentation.pdf - the binding reference for units, properties, treatments, methods, projection, the counterfactual caveats, and the UC disclaimerManagementDescriptions_v2026_1.csv - the 24 treatments and the factors that define them (the file key in each filename comes from this table)v2026.1/catalog.json - machine-readable inventory../conus/ - the measured baseline these scenarios are built onwildlandalmanac.orgSix layer directories, western conterminous U.S., a single 2024 baseline water year, 30 m resolution, EPSG:5070 (NAD83 / CONUS Albers). All files are Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs), single-band int16, with missing/masked pixels set to -9999. Each treated layer carries one file per treatment; the file key replaces the water year that the observed Almanac uses.
Cover-driven properties (4)
WaterFlux_AETmax/ - maximum (vegetation-driven, no drought limitation) evapotranspiration under the treated canopyCarbon_GPP/ - gross primary production under the treated canopyCarbon_AGB/ - aboveground live biomass remaining after the treatmentVulner_TreeDieoff_SPI-2/ - relative index of tree-canopy vulnerability to severe drought, after the treatment (a western index; see documentation)Fire behavior (2)
Fire_FL/ - treated flame lengthFire_ROS/ - treated rate of spreadThe fire layers are computed from per-treatment fire-behavior landscapes built from the treated vegetation, run at fixed conditions, and are best read as a relative hazard for comparing treatments rather than an absolute prediction. The treated landscapes themselves are an internal modeling step and are not distributed.
That is 144 COGs: 96 cover-driven (4 properties x 24 treatments) and 48 fire-behavior (2 layers x 24 treatments).
The 24 treatments (the file key in each filename). Definitions and the factors that set each one are in the documentation (§3.1) and the ManagementDescriptions_v2026_1.csv table in this directory:
UndisturbedTimberHighPrivate, TimberMediumPrivate, TimberLowPrivate, TimberMediumPublic, TimberLowPublicPrescribedFirePrivate, PrescribedFirePublicMechanicalFuelPrivate, MechanicalFuelPublicStewardshipPrivate, StewardshipPublicHeliLoggingLow, HeliLoggingMediumSalvageLoggingHighBeetle, SalvageLoggingMediumBeetle, SalvageLoggingHighFirePileBurnShrubMast, ThinBelowLowMast, ThinBelowHighMastMultiTreat_MediumThinMastRXburn, MultiTreat_HighThinMastRXburn, MultiTreat_HighThinMastFilenames follow WildlandAlmanac_CONUSwest_{Property}_2024_{Treatment}.tif, where {Property} is one of the six layer directories above. See the documentation PDF for full per-layer specifications, units, scaling conventions, and caveats.
A few things to keep in front of you; the documentation has the rest.
Undisturbed treatment reproduces the observed Almanac. Every treated surface is anchored to the observed 2024 layer, so the no-treatment case matches the published Wildland Almanac (WaterFlux_AETmax, Carbon_GPP, Carbon_AGB) pixel-for-pixel, and all treatments share that observed geography. Differences between two treatments are directly comparable; differences from Undisturbed are the treatment effect.WaterFlux_AETmax is potential ET, not water yield. It is the canopy's potential evapotranspiration, not realized water use or streamflow. Its change under a treatment is the canopy-driven change in water demand - an upper bound on the water a treatment could free, not a runoff forecast. In water-limited country the water actually freed is less than that change.Fire_FL and Fire_ROS are a relative hazard. They are computed at fixed run conditions to make treatments comparable, not calibrated to any particular fire-weather scenario. Read them as "how much does this treatment move modeled fire behavior relative to no treatment," not as an operational flame-length or spread-rate forecast.The Almanac uses an archival versioning model:
v2026.1/, v2027.1/, …). Files at a published version URL are stable: once a version has been used in published work, its contents are preserved.v2026.2/) with its own DOI, and the prior version will be retained.Cite the version you used. Each release receives its own DOI. When citing the scenarios in a paper, plan, or other document where future readers may need to verify the exact values you relied on, cite the specific version (and DOI), not the dataset as a whole.
The data are Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs served over both S3 and HTTPS. Three access patterns, in increasing order of effort:
Stream it - most common, no download. GIS tools (ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, rasterio, terra) read COGs directly from cloud storage, transferring only the bytes needed for your current window.
s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/wildland-almanac/treatment-scenarios/v2026.1/{Property}/WildlandAlmanac_CONUSwest_{Property}_2024_{Treatment}.tif/vsicurl/https://data.source.coop/wildland-almanac/treatment-scenarios/v2026.1/{Property}/WildlandAlmanac_CONUSwest_{Property}_2024_{Treatment}.tifDownload one file - curl, wget, browser, or PowerShell Invoke-WebRequest against the HTTPS URL above. To clip a lat/long box without downloading the whole file, use gdalwarp -te ... -te_srs EPSG:4326 /vsicurl/<url> clip.tif - GDAL fetches only the tiles overlapping your box. (The western grid is large, so clipping to an area of interest rather than downloading whole layers is usually the right approach.)
Bulk download - AWS CLI with --no-sign-request (no account needed):
aws s3 sync s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/wildland-almanac/treatment-scenarios/v2026.1/{Property}/ ./{Property}/ --no-sign-request
These scenarios are built on the observed Wildland Almanac and inherit its limits; the treatment response adds a further layer of simplification on top. They are a first-order screen, not a site-specific prediction. Anyone using them for a specific decision should look critically at the values for their area of interest, compare against on-the-ground knowledge, and read the documentation's notes on methods and caveats - in particular the counterfactual framing, the interpretation of WaterFlux_AETmax, and the relative-hazard reading of the fire layers. The decision to release the data publicly reflects our judgment that it can aid planning and research and that use-with-feedback is the path to improvement. Reports of what looks wrong are the most valuable contribution a user can make.
Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY). Free to use, share, and adapt with attribution.
University of California disclaimer. These data are a University of California product, provided "as is" with no warranty; the user assumes all risk of use. Use of the data implies consent to the full University of California disclaimer, reproduced in the documentation PDF.
Goulden, M.L. (2026). The Wildland Almanac - Treatment Scenarios (Version v2026.1). Source Cooperative. DOI: [pending - EZID]. Released under CC BY.
When citing analyses based on these data, cite the specific version (above). Different versions may differ in detail; the version DOI is what makes your analysis reproducible.
Found something wrong, or have a use case to share? Please file an issue on GitHub: github.com/wildland-almanac/wildland-almanac-site/issues. Reports of errors and notes on real-world use are tracked there and folded into future releases.
Contact: mgoulden@uci.edu · Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. The data are offered with no promise of technical support, but feedback on errors and use cases is welcome and shapes future releases.
The Wildland Almanac is an outgrowth of the Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions (CECS), which was supported by California's Strategic Growth Council. The Treatment Scenarios extend the Almanac with a counterfactual layer; earlier work and publications referencing CECS share the same project lineage.