Creating a Comprehensive Western American/Canadian Fire Dataset, 1880-2018

The currently available fire-history data of Western North America (US/Canada) available for geographic and other analyses is largely piecemeal and difficult to find. Data from before the 1980s is scattered among many sources and held by a plethora of different agencies. The aim of this project was to change that daunting reality and provide a single dataset that would fill that data gap and make doing research on and mapping of fires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries more accessible. This data encompasses 138 years (1880 - 2018), 12 US states, three Canadian provinces and two Canadian territories. Currently existing digital datasets were combined and streamlined into a single dataset with unified attributes and units. During this process, I found a total of 143,702 fires that totaled 1,793,542.62 sq. kilometers of burned area. The final data is available to the public via the web as a set of ESRI shapefiles.