Abstract
Abstract. The statistical analysis of wildfire activity is a critical component of national wildfire planning, operations, and research in the United States (US). However, there are multiple federal, state, and local entities with wildfire protection and reporting responsibilities in the US, and no single, unified system of wildfire record keeping exists. To conduct even the most rudimentary interagency analyses of wildfire numbers and area burned from the authoritative systems of record, one must harvest records from dozens of disparate databases with inconsistent information content. The onus is then on the user to check for and purge redundant records of the same fire (i.e., multijurisdictional incidents with responses reported by several agencies or departments) after pooling data from different sources. Here we describe our efforts to acquire, standardize, error-check, compile, scrub, and evaluate the completeness of US federal, state, and local wildfire records from 1992–2011 for the national, interagency Fire Program Analysis (FPA) application. The resulting FPA Fire-Occurrence Database (FPA FOD) includes nearly 1.6 million records from the 20 yr period, with values for at least the following core data elements: location, at least as precise as a Public Land Survey System section (2.6 km2 grid), discovery date, and final fire size. The FPA FOD is publicly available from the Research Data Archive of the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (doi:10.2737/RDS-2013-0009). While necessarily incomplete in some aspects, the database is intended to facilitate fairly high-resolution geospatial analysis of US wildfire activity over the past two decades, based on available information from the authoritative systems of record.
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences
Reference81 articles.
1. Ager, A. A., Vaillant, N. M., and Finney, M. A.: A comparison of landscape fuel treatment strategies to mitigate wildland fire risk in the urban interface and preserve old forest structure, Forest Ecol. Manag., 259, 1556–1570, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2010.01.032, 2010.
2. Andrews, P.: Fire danger rating and fire behaviour prediction in the United States, in: Proceedings of the Fifth NRIFD Symposium, International Symposium on Forest Fire Protection, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, 30 November–2 December, 106–117, 2005.
3. Andrews, P. L. and Bradshaw, L. S.: FIRES: Fire Information Retrieval and Evaluation System – a program for fire danger rating analysis, USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station, Ogden, UT, USA, General Technical Report INT-GTR-367, 64 pp., 1997.
4. Andrews, P., Finney, M., and Fischetti, M.: Predicting wildfires, Sci. Am., August, 47–55, 2007.
5. Artley, D. K.: Wildland fire protection and response in the United States: the responsibilities, authorities, and roles of federal, state, local, and tribal government, Report for the International Association of Fire Chiefs, available at: http://www.iafc.org/files/wild_MissionsProject.pdf, 2009.
Cited by
123 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献