2.1. Study Identification
We performed systematic literature searches in September 2023 on Scopus and Web of Science using keywords: “wildfire” OR “fire” AND “dissolved organic carbon” OR “nitrate” AND “concentration” AND “export” OR “discharge” OR “stream” OR “river” OR “creek” OR “watershed” to generate a list of peer-reviewed papers reporting the effects of fire on nitrate and DOC in paired burned and unburned watersheds. After combining the literature search results and removing duplicate publications, a list of 226 initial papers were identified. This list of publications was filtered by the following criteria (Fig. S1): 1) the burn was a wildfire (i.e., no prescribed burns), 2) the study design encompassed a paired watershed approach (burned and unburned reference sites), 3) the study reported either nitrate and/or DOC data, 4) data were reported as time-series (not only means and standard deviations) to allow for incorporation of seasonal variability, and 5) the study was located within North America (Fig. 1). While our goal was to be a global study, only two publications were located outside of North America after the first four criteria, indicating a gap globally on the investigation of the effects of wildfire on these parameters. After filtering based on these criteria, this meta-analysis includes 18 publications that span 3 biomes, 62 watersheds, and 20 unique wildfires (Table 1; Fig. 1). Metadata and data extraction can be found in a public repository (Cavaiani et al., 2024).