Victoria Fire History and Severity Records from 1903

A geospatial dataset of fire scars and severity classifications for fires across Victoria, Australia, primarily on public land since 1903. The Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action maintains the data, which was updated in August 2025 and includes the 24/25 fire season. It aggregates historic fire severity classifications from 1998 onward, reclassified using a standardized procedure.

Use Cases

• Analyze spatial patterns of wildfire occurrence based on fire scar boundaries since 1903.
• Model fire severity trends over time based on aggregated classification data from 1998 onward.
• Assess the impact of planned burns using DELWP burn information included in the dataset.
• Map fire history for specific regions using GIS techniques to interrogate overlapping fire events.

Strengths

• Long temporal coverage spanning over a century, with records from 1903.
• Includes both wildfire and planned burn data, providing a broader view of fire history.
• Severity data uses a standardized, conservative classification method (Level 2 Classification) for consistency.
• Dataset was updated in August 2025, ensuring it includes the recent 24/25 fire season.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data on private land fires is only included from 2009 onward, creating a temporal gap.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.

Provenance

Source

Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action

Collection Method

Aggregated from spatial records of fires on public land and DELWP planned burns.

Time Range

1903 to present (includes 24/25 fire season)

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-09 03:22:08.629813; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Victoria, Australia