CAL FIRE's Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) annually maintains and distributes an historical 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, the 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 app contains three pages of maps and documentation of the historical fire perimeter metadata:

Historical Fire Perimeters: The landing page highlights the recent large fires (≥5,000 acres) on a backdrop of all of the dataset's documented fire perimeters dating back to 1878.  This map includes perimeters symbolized by decade, county boundaries, California Vegetation, and NAIP imagery back to 2005.  This page provides users the ability to add their own data or filter the fire perimeter data.  It cleanly lists fire perimeters shown on the map with their name, year, and GIS calculated acreage.  The user can navigate to the CAL FIRE current incident webpage or provide comments to the dataset's steward.

Times Burned: The second page provides a map showing an analysis performed annually on the fire perimeter dataset to show case burn frequency from 1950 to present for fires greater than one acre. 

Fire Across Time:  This third page provides a time enabled layer of the fire perimeter dataset, featuring a time slider to allow users to view the perimeter dataset across time.

The final page provides the user with the dataset's metadata, including its most current data dictionary.

For any questions, please contact the data steward:

Kim Wallin, GIS Specialist

CAL FIRE, Fire & Resource Assessment Program (FRAP)

kimberly.wallin@fire.ca.gov