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 wildland fire datasets that identify wildfire and prescribed fire areas across the United States. However, these datasets are all limited in some way. Time periods, spatial extents, attributes, and maintenance for these datasets are highly variable, and none of the existing datasets provide a comprehensive picture of wildfires that have burned since the 1800s. Utilizing a series of both manual processes and ArcGIS Python (arcpy) scripts, we merged 40 of these disparate datasets into a single dataset that encompasses the known wildfires within the United States from the 1800s to the present. These datasets were ranked by order of observed quality, and overlapping polygons in the same year were used individually or dissolved together with other polygons based on ranked quality (see individual ste ...

First, we would like to thank the wildland fire advisory group. Their wisdom and guidance helped us build the dataset as it currently exists. This dataset is comprised of two different zip files. Zip File 1: The data within this zip file are composed of two wildland fire datasets. (1) A merged dataset consisting of 40 different wildfire and prescribed fire layers. The original 40 layers were all freely obtained from the internet or provided to the authors free of charge with permission to use them. The merged layers were altered to contain a consistent set of attributes including names, IDs, and dates. This raw merged dataset contains all original polygons many of which are duplicates of the same fire. This dataset also contains all the errors, inconsistencies, and other issues that caused some of the data to be excluded from the combined dataset. Care should be used when working with this dataset as individual records may contain errors that can be more easily identified in the ...

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 a ...