Fireline engagement from the National Interagency Fire Center Feature Service from 2017-2024

The escalation of wildfires in the USA, coupled with rising firefighting costs and decreasing workforce capacity, underscores the critical need to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of containment measures. However, the existing spatial data that records the locations and types of containment measures and wildfire perimeters contains numerous errors and redundancies. This data publication includes a comprehensive fireline quality assurance and quality control dataset developed from the wildland firefighting operations data reported in the National Interagency Fire Center National Incident Feature Service (NIFC) from 2017-2024. This improved dataset contains reliable spatial locations for fireline built during suppression operations, the associated verified fire perimeters, and identifies where containment was a success or failure. This improved final dataset represents critical information that has not been previously available to assess the success of fireline operations and incident management resource use efficiency.
To provide a quality-assured spatial dataset of historical firelines, extracted from the National Interagency Fire Center's operational data for fires greater than 1000 acres from 2017-2024. It also includes an analysis of fireline effectiveness, categorizing outcomes as held, burned over, or not engaged. The lessons learned from analyses utilizing this dataset are critical for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States wildfire management system.
For more information about this study and these data, see Arkowitz et al. (in review).