Combined wildfire datasets for the United States and certain territories, 1800s-Present (combined wildland fire polygons)

First, we would like to thank the wildland fire advisory group. Their wisdom and guidance helped us build the dataset as it currently exists. Currently, there are multiple, freely available fire datasets that identify wildfire and prescribed fire burned areas across the United States. However, these datasets are all limited in some way. Their time periods could cover only a couple of decades or they may have stopped collecting data many years ago. Their spatial footprints may be limited to a specific geographic area or agency. Their attribute data may be limited to nothing more than a polygon and a year. None of the existing datasets provides a comprehensive picture of fires that have burned throughout the last few centuries. Our dataset uses these existing layers and utilizes a series of both manual processes and ArcGIS Python (arcpy) scripts to merge these existing datasets into a single dataset that encompasses the known wildfires and prescribed fires within the United States and certain territories. Forty different fire layers were utilized in this dataset. First, these datasets were ranked by order of observed quality (Tiers). The datasets were given a common set of attribute fields and as many of these fields were populated as possible within each dataset. All fire layers were then merged together (the merged dataset) by their common attributes to created a merged dataset containing all fire polygons. Polygons were then processed in order of Tier (1-8) so that overlapping polygons in the same year and Tier were dissolved together. Overlapping polygons in subsequent Tiers were removed from the dataset. Attributes from the original datasets of all intersecting polygons in the same year across all Tiers were also merged so that all attributes from all Tiers were included, but only the polygons from the highest ranking Tier were dissolved to form the fire polygon. The resulting product (the combined dataset) has only one fire per year in a given area with one set of attributes. While it combines wildfire data from 40 wildfire layers and therefore has more complete information on wildfires than the datasets that went into it, this dataset has also has its own set of limitations. Please see the Data Quality attributes within the metadata record for additional information on this dataset's limitations. Overall, we believe this dataset is designed be to a comprehensive collection of fire boundaries within the United States and provides a more thorough and complete picture of fires across the United States when compared to the datasets that went into it.

[
  "010:12"
]

[
  "geospatial"
]