WFIGS¶

Authoritative incident-level wildfire records maintained by U.S. interagency fire management systems, providing official information on real wildfire events across the United States.

Overview¶

WFIGS (Wildland Fire Incident Geospatial Services) is an interagency system that aggregates and distributes geospatial information on active and historical wildland fire incidents. Each record represents an officially reported wildfire event, rather than a satellite-detected hotspot.

WFIGS is commonly treated as an authoritative source of wildfire ground truth and is widely used to validate satellite-based fire detections and to label wildfire occurrence in modeling pipelines.

Data Characteristics¶

Spatial coverage: United States
Temporal coverage: Historical and ongoing wildfire incidents
Temporal resolution: Event-based (ignition, containment, and status updates)
Data structure: Incident-level event records (point or polygon geometries)
Data format: GIS services, GeoJSON, Shapefile
Coordinate system: Geographic and projected systems (service-dependent)

Variables¶

Typical WFIGS records include:

Incident name and unique incident identifier
Ignition date, discovery date, and containment status
Incident location (point or perimeter geometry)
Fire size, cause, and management status
Associated agency and reporting metadata

Typical Use Cases¶

Ground-truth labeling of wildfire occurrence
Validation of satellite-based fire detection products (e.g., FIRMS, GOES)
Analysis of wildfire ignition timing and spatial patterns
Integration with meteorological and fuel datasets for fire modeling studies

Access¶

WFIGS data are publicly accessible through U.S. interagency geospatial portals:

Reference¶

National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). Wildland Fire Incident Geospatial Services (WFIGS) Documentation. https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/