FPA-FOD-Plus Dataset: Physical, Social, and Biological Attributes for Improved Understanding and Prediction of Wildfire Ignitions and Size
Abstract
Wildfires are increasingly impacting social and environmental systems in the United States. From 1992-2020, 84% of wildfires in the conterminous United States (CONUS) were ignited by humans. The ability to mitigate the undesirable effects of wildfires increases as understanding of the social, physical, and biological conditions that co-occurred with or caused these ignitions, and contributed to the fire size. To this end, we developed FPA-FOD-Plus, which augments the sixth version of the Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database (FPA-FOD) with more than 100 attributes that coincide with the date and location of each fire ignition in CONUS. FPA-FOD contains information on location, jurisdiction, discovery time, cause, and final size for >2.2 million wildfire ignitions from 1992-2020 in CONUS (>2.3 million in the United States). For each ignition, we added attributes to characterize coincident weather and national fire danger indices. We also added attributes related to topography, road, vegetation, climate normals, management jurisdiction, human population density, social vulnerability, and wildfire suppression difficulty. Furthermore, we added satellite-based vegetation indices on the ignition date and 12 months prior to it to provide information on fuel availability. This publicly available, rich dataset can be used to answer numerous questions about the covariates associated with human- and lightning-ignited wildfires, and with wildfire growth. For example:
What are the major driving factors of human- and naturally-ignited wildfires across the spectrum of vegetation, climate, jurisdiction, and geography? If any, what are the type and strength of the relationship between wildfire ignitions and various covariates, and whether other attributes compound or attenuate this relationship? What are the critical weather and fire danger thresholds for wildfire growth across different ecoregions and pyromes? If any, what are the socioeconomic drivers of human ignitions? Do wildfires disproportionately impact the more vulnerable population? Finally, this tabular dataset is machine-learning ready and can train predictive models.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFMNH55B..01P