WESTERN NORTH AMERICAN FIRE OCCURRENCE DATA

WESTERLING, A.

Many fire researchers are not aware of the full extent of the fire history resources available for study of climate and wildfire in western North America. This is not surprising, since repositories of these data are widely distributed amongst state and federal administrative bodies. I have gained some familiarity with many of these data sets over the past five years, and consequently field many requests for fire history data and metadata. I will introduce workshop participants to the various available data sets, explaining their strengths and shortcomings in terms of quality, ease of use, duration of record, level of aggregation, etc. I will present material on documentary fire histories from the USDA Forest Service; the USDOI Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, and Fisheries and Wildlife Service; western State fire services; the Canadian Large Fire Database and Canadian Provincial fire agency records; and aggregate records from various sources.

I will show examples from my own recent work with these data sets of relationships between climate indices and fire activity captured in documentary records, but the emphasis of the presentation will be on the data themselves: what they are, where to get them, how to extract useful information from them, and issues to consider in using them to research climate and wildfire interactions.