Fire on the Land
Fire on the Land is the project site for a scientific graphic novel about Scotty Creek Research Station in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It is the country’s first Indigenous-led research station. It burnt down in a wildfire in late 2022.
Three things live here: the novel, a hand-drawn font carrying the Dene letters of the Dehcho region, and a speculative tool for reading burnt forest.
Built with
- Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no build step
- Sentinel-2 L2A via the Copernicus Data Space
- History API routing
Three areas
The graphic novel holds character studies, script and storyboards.
AS Dehcho is a hand-drawn handwriting font, still in progress, made for this project. It carries the Dene letters and diacritics of the Dehcho region (ą́ ę́ ł ʔ ǫ́ ų́) and the speech-bubble lettering in one family.
Adoption Scenarios is the tool, speculative for now. It reads post-fire forests by function rather than by origin: which reforestation trajectory is climate-adapted, economically viable and carbon-effective at the same time.
In numbers
2026 8 Days
The data is real
Normalized Burn Ratio tiles from Sentinel-2 L2A, pulled through the Copernicus Data Space process API for 2020, 2022 and 2024. They are laid onto red, green and blue: grey means unchanged, colour means greening at a different time.
The anchor site is Jüterbog in Brandenburg, an 800-hectare burn scar from 2019. The carbon side connects through the GHG Protocol land sector guidance.
Process
- Story first
- Bilingual site
- Real burn data
- Own Dene font
- Tool, speculative
Bilingual from the start, German and English switchable at runtime: one address, both languages in the markup rather than two page trees.
Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step. Routing runs on the History API with real paths.
Hardest call
Assess, don’t decide. The tool makes trajectories comparable and trackable; it does not recommend one.
That is a smaller product than a recommendation engine, and the right one. Nobody hands a forest decision to a website, but they will use one to argue with.
What's next
Actively built Next: AmeriFlux conference, blog entries from the exhibition, adoption scenarios reviewed
What can Iget out ofyour way?
Reach out