Combined wildfire datasets for the United States and certain territories, 1878-2019

This dataset is comprised of four different zip files. Zip File 1: A combined wildfire polygon dataset ranging in years from 1878-2019 (142 years) that was created by merging and dissolving fire information from 12 different original wildfire datasets to create one of the most comprehensive wildfire datasets available. Attributes describing fires that were reported in the various source data, including fire name, fire code, ignition date, controlled date, containment date, and fire cause, were included in this product's attribute table. Zip Files 2-4: The fire polygons were turned into 30 meter rasters with the values representing area burned in each year (128 yearly rasters total, as some years in the 1800s had no fires recorded). Three rasters were calculated from the yearly rasters: (a) their yearly values were turned to 1 and these values were summed to create a count of the number of times burned, (b) the first time a pixel burned was selected to create a first year burned raster, and (c) the last time a pixel burned was selected to create a most recent year burned raster. These calculations were done for the contiguous US, Alaska, and Hawaii separately in order to reduce file size and download time. Each of the zipped files contains the three rasters for one of the following locations: contiguous US, Alaska, and Hawaii.