COLORADO—As fire seasons become longer, the amount of land burned each year has become greater. Climate change and other factors have meant more wildfires occurring outside of historic fire seasons in different parts of the country as well as more extreme fire behavior.

To improve our ability to predict, manage and recover from fire, having data about how fire has behaved in the past is important. Rocky Mountain Research Station research ecologist Dr. Karen Short recently updated the Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database. This database catalogues all wildfires reported in the U.S. from 1992-2018, representing a total of 165 million acres burned during the 27-year period. These data have served as critical inputs for many notable products, including a national wildfire hazard map and associated Wildfire Risk to Communities analyses. They are ready for use by fire managers, planners, decision makers and others inside and outside the agency.

“This unique database is a compilation of spatial wildfire records from the final fire reporting systems of the federal, state and local fire services. Those multiple systems don’t necessarily mesh well together, and the combined records must be carefully scrubbed to yield a single record for each individual fire,” said Short.

The database was originally developed to support the national interagency Fire Program Analysis system, but it has widespread utility in the fields of wildland fire science and management, as well as in the areas of ecology, carbon and climate. For example, these data have been used by multiple insurance companies and posted on a number of state government websites for internal and external use.

The latest version is the fourth update of the database and includes 2.17 million records of federal and non-federal wildfires, each indicating the fire’s reported point of origin, discovery date and final size. Additional elements like fire name and cause are included in the database and populated with values as available. While not part of the original fire reports, record identifiers that can be used to link to related wildfire data products, including a national dataset of satellite-derived fire perimeters, are also included for a subset of the fires.

In addition to incorporating data for 2016-2018 during this update, some previously unavailable nonfederal wildfire records for the period 1999-2015 were acquired either directly from state fire services (New Hampshire, New Jersey) or indirectly from an updated National Association of State Foresters database (Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Oklahoma, South Dakota) and added to this update.