Fuel break encounters with large wildfires in southern California National Forests and associated biophysical, suppression, weather, and fire behavior characteristics

We built a dataset of fuel break encounters with recent (2017-2020) large wildfires in southern California and their associated biophysical, suppression, weather, and fire behavior characteristics to develop statistical models of fuel break effectiveness. This data publication contains the spatial and tabular data used in the analysis. The spatial data include fuel break polylines and associated wildfire extent polygons. Tabular data include wildfire attributes such as fire identifiers, start year, source, discovery dates, as well as some additional information obtained from the incident status summary report and a fire plan analysis fire occurrence dataset. Additional tabular data describing the fuel break-wildfire interaction samples points are also included such as coordinates, outcomes, and predictor variables.
To characterize fuel break success rates and how fuel break effectiveness relates to factors such as weather, fire behavior, fuel break condition, accessibility, topography, and suppression.
These data were published on 02/28/2023. Minor metadata updates were made on 08/08/2024. For more information about this study and these data, see Gannon et al. (2023).