Wildfire building destruction and exposure in the conterminous United States, 2002-2022

This geospatial dataset maps point locations of all buildings that were destroyed by or exposed to destructive wildfires from 2002-2022. The data include all wildfire events in the conterminous United States where at least 10 buildings were destroyed (n=362). Using a public building footprint dataset from Microsoft (Bing Maps Team, 2018), we overlaid buildings with high-resolution pre- and post-fire aerial imagery to classify them as burned or unburned. We included all buildings within wildfire perimeters, as well as within a 2.4-km buffer outside the perimeter (representing the definition of the wildland-urban interface). We mapped building loss for 228 fires from 2014-2022 and incorporated existing building destruction data for 2002-2013 (Alexandre et al., 2016; Kramer et al., 2018) and for a few large fires from 2014-2018 (Caggiano et al., 2020). The 2002-2013 data were filtered to match our criterion of 10 or more destroyed buildings per fire and quality-checked by comparing destroyed building counts with incident report totals. We also added buildings within the 2.4-km buffer area outside fire perimeters using Microsoft building points, after comparing points to historical aerial imagery to remove developments that were not present at the time of fire. This data release includes a zipped shapefile containing point locations of all digitized buildings, with fields providing wildfire IDs, ignition dates, post-fire building condition (burned or unburned), and exposure type (building location relative to the fire perimeter). We also include a shapefile containing wildfire perimeters and a CSV table summarizing numbers of exposed and destroyed buildings for each fire. The combined dataset provides the first spatially precise assessment of wildfire building losses and exposure across the entire conterminous United States that allows for analysis of destruction trends over two decades. Alexandre, P. M., Stewart, S. I., Keuler, N. S., Clayton, M. K., Mockrin, M. H., Bar-Massada, A., Syphard, A. D., & Radeloff, V. C. (2016). Factors related to building loss due to wildfires in the conterminous United States. Ecological Applications, 26(7), 2323–2338. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.1376 Bing Maps Team. (2018). Microsoft Building Footprints [Geospatial data]. Microsoft Planetary Computer. https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/dataset/ms-buildings Caggiano, M. D., Hawbaker, T. J., Gannon, B. M., & Hoffman, C. M. (2020). Building loss in WUI disasters: evaluating the core components of the wildland–urban interface definition. Fire, 3(4), 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire3040073 Kramer, H. A., Mockrin, M. H., Alexandre, P. M., Stewart, S. I., & Radeloff, V. C. (2018). Where wildfires destroy buildings in the US relative to the wildland–urban interface and national fire outreach programs. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 27(5), 329-341. https://doi.org/10.1071/WF17135

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