U.S. Wildfire Occurrence Records with Geospatial Points, 1992-2020

2.3 million geo-referenced wildfire records from the United States, representing 180 million acres burned over a 29-year period. The Fire Program Analysis fire-occurrence database (FPA FOD) was compiled by Karen C. Short of the US Forest Service from federal, state, and local fire organization reports. This sixth edition of the database was published on November 1, 2022.

Use Cases

• Analyze spatial and temporal trends in wildfire occurrence based on discovery date and point location data.
• Model wildfire risk and causes using the updated wildfire-cause standard and final fire size.
• Link fire reports to large-fire-perimeter datasets using the included identifiers for operational analysis.

Strengths

• Contains 2.3 million records spanning 29 years (1992-2020).
• Represents a total of 180 million acres burned.
• Data conforms to National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) standards where possible.
• Includes identifiers to link to other authoritative fire datasets.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

US Forest Service, compiled from federal, state, and local fire organization reporting systems.

Collection Method

Records were acquired, transformed to NWCG standards, error-checked, and redundant records were removed.

Time Range

1992 to 2020

Freshness

Data covers up to 2020, with the database edition published in 2022.

Geography

United States