U.S. Department of the Interior wildfire risk map for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service

Wildfire is a natural ecological process essential for maintaining ecosystem structure and function, yet it increasingly threatens lives, property, and infrastructure in the United States. Since 2000, wildfire sizes and burned area have increased substantially across large portions of the United States due to factors that include prolonged drought, increased human ignitions, spread of fire-prone invasive species, and fuel accumulation. Additionally, the potential for wildfire disasters is compounded by continued development in the wildland-urban interface. These trends are increasingly challenging for federal agencies working to mitigate wildfire risks. Over the past 25 years, wildfire-related legislation and policy have directed agencies to use wildfire hazard and wildfire risk assessments to prioritize activities to mitigate wildfire risk in specific areas, such as areas with high and very-high wildfire hazard potential, the wildland-urban interface, critical watersheds, or tribal lands.

Executive Order 14308 (June 12, 2025) mandated that the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture consolidate federal wildland fire programs, including creating a unified, technology-enabled national wildfire risk map and streamlining coordination and resources to enhance preparedness and empower local response efforts. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretarial Order 3443 (September 10, 2025) formalized the call to unify DOI's wildland fire management programs across its bureaus, breaking down bureaucratic barriers, and standardizing training, procurement, and technology across more than 500 million acres. Building on EO 14308 and SO 3443, DOI Secretarial Order 3448 (January 12, 2026) established the U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS), consolidating fire management authorities into a single entity to improve operational agility, centralized planning, and cohesive interagency collaboration in wildfire prevention, suppression, and recovery.

After the publication of EO 14308 and SO 3443, the DOI Office of Wildland Fire directed a team of scientists and wildland fire, fuels, and post-fire specialists from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Geological Survey to design an interim wildfire risk map to support DOI’s fuels management program of work. The purpose of the map was to provide the DOI and USWFS with a national- to regional-scale assessment of wildfire risk to (1) communicate what risk looks like across DOI lands to people inside and outside of DOI, (2) analyze how risk varies across the country and across regions, (3) evaluate the workload associated with reducing risk, (4) guide efforts to mitigate risk, and (5) understand DOI’s risk profile as the USWFS coordinates and potentially consolidates wildland fire management operations with the Forest Service.

We generated the wildfire risk map for Alaska, the conterminous United States (CONUS), and Hawaii to enable consistent national-scale analysis and facilitate comparison with other existing national wildfire hazard and risk assessments. However, the risk map was informed exclusively by DOI. Therefore, the map is only intended to represent wildfire risk relevant to DOI lands and responsibilities and should not be interpreted as a comprehensive assessment of wildfire risk for non-DOI lands.

Wildfire risk assessments integrate information about valued assets, the likelihood of wildfires occurring, and the potential damage to valued assets from wildfires. The urgent need of the USWFS for a wildfire risk map required our team to rely on existing datasets to represent wildfire hazard and valued assets. The team reviewed different approaches and national-scale datasets representing wildfire hazard and selected the Wildfire Hazard Potential (WHP; Dillon and others, 2015, Dillon and others, 2023) to represent wildfire hazard in the wildfire risk map, in part because WHP has been specified as an important data source to represent wildfire hazard and target risk mitigation in existing federal law (H.R. 3684). WHP integrates wildfire burn probability with intensity, while also considering small wildfire ignition probabilities, crown fire potential, and resistance to control effort. The 2023 WHP version used Large Fire Simulation System (FSIM; Finney and others, 2011) wildfire simulations based on the 2020 LANDFIRE data (La Puma and others, 2023), representing fuel conditions at the end of 2020. The categorical WHP data were translated to an index of hazard and potential damage to valued assets by assigning a value of zero to WHP open water and non-burnable lands and values of one to five to the very-low, low, moderate, high, and very-high WHP categories, respectively.

The Executive and Secretarial Orders emphasized wildfire risks to life, property, and infrastructure. Thus, our team considered the wide range of unique management priorities and valued assets across the DOI bureaus to identify data layers that effectively represent these three unique types of values (life, property, and infrastructure) consistently nationwide. Specifically, valued assets were included if they are directly affected by wildfire, essential to emergency response or DOI operations, important to community function, or represent potential wildfire management opportunities. We also considered whether valued assets provided additional representation of ignition patterns not already represented in the WHP data. Selected valued assets were supported by national scale, publicly available datasets, that were applicable across all DOI bureaus, and that could be represented without complex modeling. To reflect the EO and SO priorities, assets were organized into three groups: Life (human population distributions), Property (buildings and DOI facilities), and Infrastructure (communications, energy, hydropower and water supply, and transportation systems).

Life was represented by daytime and nighttime gridded population data, property was represented by DOI facilities and structure locations, and multiple datasets were used to represent locations where communications-, energy-, hydropower-, water supply- and transportation-related infrastructure might be at risk from wildfires (Bhaduri and others 2007; U.S. Department of the Interior 2026, U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency 2026). We removed structures in wilderness areas because they were potential commission errors. We applied a 2400-meter (1.5 miles) buffer around each unique valued asset category (life, property, and infrastructure), in alignment with the distance used by federal agencies to define wildland-urban interface communities within the vicinity of federal lands that are at high risk from wildfire (Federal Register 2001). The individual buffers were aggregated to represent the count of overlapping buffers, resulting in a range of zero to three valued assets.

This data release includes the original risk layers (calculated with per-pixel inputs and buffered inputs), the valued asset layers for life, property, and infrastructure, and for all three combined (per-pixel and buffered), the wilderness mask used to remove commission errors in the structures data, and the WHP layer. Layers for risk combinations and risk classifications are provided using only buffered inputs. Each layer has a separate file for three regions: (1) Alaska, (2) conterminous United States (CONUS), and (3) Hawaii, and uses common projections and raster extents for each region to facilitate additional processing. Details for processing steps and data sources are contained in the metadata. The data_dictionary.csv file also lists all the data layers, their data type, and range of values.

This data release also includes a python script to download all of the data files: batch_metadata_download.py.

References for this abstract can be found in the supplemental information section of the metadata.