Projected Wildfire Burn Probability for Canada Under Climate Scenarios, 2020-2100

Canada's forested ecozones are covered by spatially explicit projections of wildfire burn probability at a 30-meter resolution. The dataset was developed by Natural Resources Canada within the National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System framework and published in 2025. It models future burn probability for four climate scenarios and four time periods from 2021 to 2100, based on climate, vegetation, and topographic conditions.

Use Cases

• Modeling long-term wildfire risk trends based on projected climate scenarios.
• Assessing spatial patterns of burn probability across Canada's forested ecozones.
• Comparing fire hazard outcomes under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).
• Informing community and infrastructure resilience planning based on 30-meter resolution risk maps.
• Analyzing changes in burn probability between future time periods and a 1991-2020 baseline.

Strengths

• High spatial resolution of 30 meters for detailed analysis.
• Covers four distinct future climate scenarios (SSP1-2.6 to SSP5-8.5).
• Projects across four future time periods (2021-2040 to 2081-2100) and includes a 1991-2020 baseline.
• Developed within a national monitoring framework (NTEMS) and published in peer-reviewed literature.

Limitations

• Non-climate variables like vegetation are held static at 2020 conditions, which may not reflect future land cover changes.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale computational workflows.

Provenance

Source

Natural Resources Canada, based on work by Mulverhill et al. (2025).

Collection Method

Modeled projections based on climate, vegetation, and topographic conditions within the NTEMS framework.

Time Range

Projections for 2021-2100, with a baseline from 1991-2020.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-16 16:02:34.753692; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada's forested ecozones.