The Fireshed Registry: Fireshed Boundaries for the Continental United States (v1.0)

The Fireshed Registry is a geospatial dashboard and decision tool built to organize information about wildfire transmission to communities and monitor progress towards risk reduction for communities from management investments. The concept behind the Fireshed Registry is to identify and map the source of risk rather than what is at risk across all lands in the continental US. While the Fireshed Registry was organized around mapping the source of fire risk to communities, the framework does not preclude the assessment of other resource management priorities and trends such as water, fish and aquatic or wildlife habitat, or recreation. The Fireshed Registry is also a multi-scale decision tool for quantifying, prioritizing, and geospatially displaying wildfire transmission to buildings in adjacent or nearby communities.

Fireshed areas in the Fireshed Registry are approximately 250,000 acre accounting units that are delineated based on a smoothed building exposure map of the continental United States. This size was chosen to contain most (> 99%) of the large fires, with fire sizes generally smaller than 250,000 acres, although the largest extreme event fires can span multiple firesheds.These boundaries were created by dividing up the landscape into regular-sized units that represent similar source levels of community exposure to wildfire risk. Project areas are approximately 25,000 acre accounting units nested within firesheds. This data publication includes a geodatabase that contains for both fireshed and project areas: boundaries, size, total annual number of buildings inside and outside of the area exposed by wildfires ignited within the area (based on 2010 housing unit data and 2014 fuels conditions), and percent of the area that has been disturbed since 2014 (2015-2018).

Read the full publication here.