Smoothed raster of wildfire transmission to buildings in the continental United States and Alaska: 3rd edition

Recent fire seasons in the continental United States have motivated federal agencies to explore scenarios for augmenting current fuel management and forest restoration in areas where fires ignite and spread to buildings in adjacent communities. This data publication contains two (2) geodatabase rasters representing a spatial assessment within the continental U.S. and Alaska of areas at high risk of igniting fires that spread to and expose buildings as smoothed rasters of sources of annual building exposure from wildfire. These rasters were created by intersecting simulated wildfire perimeters with building location data over 10,000 to 100,000 fire seasons. This assessment reflects 2014 vegetation conditions and 2020 building locations. These data can be used in scenario planning to helps design fuel treatment program that target wildfire exposure to developed areas. The continental scale of the data support expanded use of scenario planning science to analyze and communicate large scale expansion of current forest and fuel management initiatives.
Wildfire impacts to developed areas have stimulated wide-ranging policy discussions about the role of active forest management to reduce hazardous fuels on federal and private wildlands. An assessment of areas that have the highest likelihood to ignite fires that spread to buildings in developed areas are needed. These spatial data were used to estimate sources of wildfire ignitions that spread to and expose communities to help highlight areas that could be targeted for fuels reduction treatments and other risk mitigation efforts.
The first edition of these data was published on 03/10/2022 (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0015). The second edition changed the raster values to be per pixel values instead of per acre values (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0015-2). This third edition (published on 09/12/2023) adds the corresponding exposure raster for Alaska; the original raster for the continental U.S. was not modified in any way from the second edition. This new edition also includes metadata updates. On 10/11/2023 we updated the legend for \Supplements\BuildingExposure_CONUS_MS.png which had the “Moderate” class incorrectly denoted as 3% of total exposure, which has now been corrected to 35%. On 12/18/2023 two corrections were made to the Alaska data: 1) the raster “AK_BuildingExposure_by_90mPixel” was found to have an incorrect cell size of 30 meters, and was resampled to 90 meters (values at 90m cell centers did not change); and 2) the legend text on the Alaska map “BuildingExposure_Alaska.png” had incorrect percentages for the five building exposure classes, which was corrected. Layer files are also provided, which allow the matching of the symbology to the PNG files included in this package.