Wildfire building destruction and exposure in the conterminous United States, 2002-2022

Wildfires pose a major threat to human life and property, but there is limited information for assessing numbers or precise locations of building losses at a national scale. This geospatial dataset was developed to identify point locations of all buildings destroyed by or exposed to major wildfire disasters from 2002-2022. The data include all wildfire events in the conterminous United States where at least 10 buildings were destroyed (n=362). Using available building footprint data, we overlaid building points with pre- and post-fire aerial imagery in order to identify buildings that were burned or unburned. We included all buildings within wildfire perimeters, as well as within a 2.4-km buffer (representing the definition of the wildland-urban interface). We mapped building loss for 228 fires from 2014-2022 and also incorporated existing datasets for 2002-2013 (Alexandre et al., 2016; Kramer et al., 2018) and for a few fires from 2014-2018 (Caggiano et al., 2020), which we homogenized with our data. The data release includes a zipped folder containing a point shapefile for all digitized fires and a CSV table summarizing numbers of exposed and destroyed buildings for each fire. The combined dataset provides the first spatially precise assessment of wildfire building losses and exposure across the entire conterminous United States that allows for analysis of destruction trends over two decades.

Alexandre, P. M., Stewart, S. I., Keuler, N. S., Clayton, M. K., Mockrin, M. H., Bar-Massada, A., Syphard, A. D., & Radeloff, V. C. (2016). Factors related to building loss due to wildfires in the conterminous United States. Ecological Applications, 26(7), 2323–2338. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.1376
Caggiano, M. D., Hawbaker, T. J., Gannon, B. M., & Hoffman, C. M. (2020). Building loss in WUI disasters: evaluating the core components of the wildland–urban interface definition. Fire, 3(4), 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire3040073
Kramer, H. A., Mockrin, M. H., Alexandre, P. M., Stewart, S. I., & Radeloff, V. C. (2018). Where wildfires destroy buildings in the US relative to the wildland–urban interface and national fire outreach programs. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 27(5), 329-341. https://doi.org/10.1071/WF17135