The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) Program assesses the frequency, extent, and magnitude (size and severity) of all large wildland fires (wildfires and prescribed fires) in the conterminous United States (CONUS), Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico for the period 1984 and beyond. All fires reported as greater than 1,000 acres in the western U.S. and greater than 500 acres in the eastern U.S. are mapped across all ownerships. MTBS produces a series of geospatial and tabular data for analysis at a range of spatial, temporal, and thematic scales and are intended to meet a variety of information needs that require consistent data about fire effects through space and time. This map layer is a thematic raster image of MTBS burn severity classes for all inventoried fires occurring in CONUS during calendar year 1996. Fires omitted from this mapped inventory are those where suitable satellite imagery was not available, or fires were not discernable from available imagery.