This database includes fire perimeter polygons for fires which reached a size >= 385 ha, and burned between the years of 1984-2011. Each fire has a unique numeric identifier of "PolyID". Additional attributes are as follows:
FIRE_ID: For those fires with an ID, the ID assigned by the reporting agency of the MTBS project.
FIRENAME: Names of those fires which are named. This is uncommon in Canada.
YEAR: The year the fire burned.
MONTH: The month the fire burned. If no month data is available the field includes a 0.
DAY: The date the fire burned. Depending on the agency which provided the data, this may be the ignition date, the date of initial observation, the date of initial response, or the date the fire was extinguished. If no date data is available the field includes a 0.
DECADE: The decade the fire burned.
SIZE_HA: The size of the fire in Hectares, as calculated in ArcGIS using the spatial geometry of the shapefile, rather than the reported area.
CAUSE: The cause of the fire ignition, as represented by an alphabetical code. H = Human, L= Lightning, U=Unknown.
SOURCE: The source of the data used to delineate the fire perimeter, if available.
METHOD: The method used to delineate the fire perimeter.
JULIAN: The Julian day the fire burned, representing the fire season. A value of 0 is used for fires with no date or month data. Many of these are prescribed fires.
COUNTRY: The country in which the fire burned. For fires which crossed international borders the country with the largest burned area is listed.
T1: For select Canadian fires, the name of a clear prefire Landsat image.
T2: For select Canadian fires, the name of clear postfire Landsat image.
COVER: Classification of the region inwhich a fire burned as Forested and Unforested, as determined by the CEC Ecoregional Classification (http://www.cec.org/Page.asp?PageID=122&ContentID=1329).
SEVERITY: Coming soon, as data becomes available.
The fire perimeters collected in this database were provided by and collected from from the following sources: The Canadian National Fire Database (http://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb), the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity project (http://mtbs.gov/dataaccess.html), and Parks Canada (http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/mtn/feuveg-fireveg/index.aspx).
Additional attribute data was joined from the following sources: The Federal Wildland Fire Occurence Database (http://wildfire.cr.usgs.gov/firehistory/data.html), and the Spatial wildfire occurence data for the United States [2nd ed.], Short, 2014 (http://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/Product/RDS-2013-0009.2/).
