Overview

This set of web pages documents the development of a daily fire-start data set for the U.S. and Canada for the interval 1986-2013. There were several steps involved in the construction of this data set. These include:

• initial editing and clean-up of candidate data sets
• selection of the appropriate candidate data sets to merge
• selection of an appropriate (lower) fire-size threshold to produce a homogeneous merged data set
• development of a common set of fire-cause descriptions across data sets

The links above provide the following information:

• Introduction: Discussion of the analysis steps
• Data Sets: Examination of individual data sets
• Merging Data: Development of the merged data sets
• Analyses: Analyses of the merged data
• Analyses: Data: .csv and .Rdata files

Data

The end product is a merged data set containing the start date, location, ultimate size and cause of 2,089,544 fires, which may be downloaded using the Data link above.