By Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center
September 15, 2020
USGS researchers created a comprehensive wildfire dataset for the United States that spans 142 years, from 1878-2019.
This is one of the most comprehensive wildfire datasets available and was created from 12 different and online wildfire datasets. These data do not depict all wildfires that have occurred in the U.S. since 1878 but only those from the contributing data sources with a documented fire year. Whenever possible, the following attributes were associated with these fires: fire name, fire code, ignition date, controlled date, containment date, and fire cause. All wildfires have the attributes of original data source or sources that contain the polygon, additional names, codes, and dates that may be associated with the wildfire polygon. In addition to the polygon data, the dataset also contains summary rasters displaying a count of the number of times each pixel burned, the first year burned, and the most recent year burned. Researchers plan to update the dataset yearly as new wildfire information becomes available.
Welty, J.L., Jeffries, M.I., 2020, Combined wildfire datasets for the United States and certain territories, 1878-2019: U.S. Geological Survey Data Release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9Z2VVRT
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