California Historical Fire Perimeters

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) annually maintains and distributes an historical wildland fire perimeter dataset from across public and private lands in California. The GIS data is developed with the cooperation of the United States Forest Service Region 5, the Bureau of Land Management, California State Parks, National Park Service and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and is released in the spring with added data from the previous calendar year. Although the dataset represents the most complete digital record of fire perimeters in California, it is still incomplete, and users should be cautious when drawing conclusions based on the data.  This data should be used carefully for statistical analysis and reporting due to missing perimeters (see Use Limitation in metadata). Some fires are missing because historical records were lost or damaged, were too small for the minimum cutoffs, had inadequate documentation or have not yet been incorporated into the database. Other errors with the fire perimeter database include duplicate fires and over-generalization. Additionally, over-generalization, particularly with large old fires, may show unburned "islands" within the final perimeter as burned. Users of the fire perimeter database must exercise caution in application of the data. Careful use of the fire perimeter database will prevent users from drawing inaccurate or erroneous conclusions from the data. This data is updated annually in the spring with fire perimeters from the previous fire season. This dataset may differ in California compared to that available from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) due to different requirements between the two datasets. The data covers fires back to 1878.  As of May 2024, it represents fire23_1. Please help improve this dataset by filling out this survey with feedback:Historic Fire Perimeter Dataset Feedback (arcgis.com)Current criteria for data collection are as follows:CAL FIRE (including contract counties) submit perimeters ≥10 acres in timber, ≥50 acres in brush, or ≥300 acres in grass, and/or ≥3 impacted residential or commercial structures, and/or caused ≥1 fatality.All cooperating agencies submit perimeters ≥10 acres.Version update:Firep23_1 was released in May 2024. Two hundred eighty four fires from the 2023 fire season were added to the database (21 from BLM, 102 from CAL FIRE, 72 from Contract Counties, 19 from LRA, 9 from NPS, 57 from USFS and 4 from USFW).  The 2020 Cottonwood fire, 2021 Lone Rock and Union fires, as well as the 2022 Lost Lake fire were added.  USFW submitted a higher accuracy perimeter to replace the 2022 River perimeter.  Additionally, 48 perimeters were digitized from an historical map included in a publication from Weeks, d. et al. The Utilization of El Dorado County Land. May 1934, Bulletin 572.  University of California, Berkeley.  Two thousand eighteen perimeters had attributes updated, the bulk of which had IRWIN IDs added. A duplicate 2020 Erbes perimeter was removed.  The following fires were identified as meeting our collection criteria, but are not included in this version and will hopefully be added in the next update: Big Hill #2 (2023-CAHIA-001020).  YEAR_ field changed to a short integer type.  San Diego CAL FIRE UNIT_ID changed to SDU (the former code MVU is maintained in the UNIT_ID domains).  COMPLEX_INCNUM renamed to COMPLEX_ID and is in process of transitioning from local incident number to the complex IRWIN ID.  Perimeters managed in a complex in 2023 are added with the complex IRWIN ID.  Those previously added will transition to complex IRWIN IDs in a future update.Includes separate layers filtered by criteria as follows:California Fire Perimeters (All): Unfiltered. The entire collection of wildfire perimeters in the database.  It is scale dependent and starts displaying at the country level scale. Recent Large Fire Perimeters (≥5000 acres): Filtered for wildfires greater or equal to 5,000 acres for the last 5 years of fires (2019-2023), symbolized with color by year and is scale dependent and starts displaying at the country level scale. Year-only labels for recent large fires.California Fire Perimeters (1950+):  Filtered for wildfires that started in 1950-present.  Symbolized by decade, and display starting at country level scale.Detailed metadata is included in the following documents:Wildland Fire Perimeters (Firep23_1) Metadata For any questions, please contact the data steward:Kim Wallin, GIS SpecialistCAL FIRE, Fire & Resource Assessment Program (FRAP)kimberly.wallin@fire.ca.gov