The data presented in this data release represent observations of postfire debris flows that have been collected from publicly available datasets. Data originate from 13 different countries: the United States, Australia, China, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, South Korea, and Japan. The data are located in the file called “PFDF_database_sortedbyReference.txt” and a description of each column header can be found in both the file “column_headers.txt” and the metadata file (“Post-fire Debris-Flow Database (Literature Derived).xml”). The observations are derived from areas that have been burned by wildfire and are global in nature. However, this dataset is synthesized from information collected by many different researchers for different purposes, and therefore not all fields are available for each of the observations. Missing information is indicated by the value “-9999” in the ”PFDF_database_sortedbyReference.txt” file. Note that the text file contains special characters and a mix of date-time formats that reflect the original data provided by the authors. The text may not be displayed correctly if it is opened by proprietary software such as Microsoft Excel but will appear correctly when opened in a text editor software.