The Fireshed Registry: Fireshed and subfireshed boundaries for the continental United States and Hawaii: 4th edition

The Fireshed Registry is a geospatial dashboard and decision tool built to organize information about wildfire transmission to communities and monitor progress towards risk reduction for communities from management investments. The concept behind the Fireshed Registry is to identify and map the source of risk rather than what is at risk across all lands in the continental United States and Hawaii. While the Fireshed Registry was organized around mapping the source of fire risk to communities, the framework does not preclude the assessment of other resource management priorities and trends such as water, fish and aquatic or wildlife habitat, or recreation. The Fireshed Registry is also a multi-scale decision tool for quantifying, prioritizing, and geospatially displaying wildfire transmission to buildings in adjacent or nearby communities. Fireshed areas in the Fireshed Registry are approximately 250,000-acre accounting units that are delineated based on smoothed building exposure maps of the continental United States and Hawaii. These boundaries were created by dividing up the landscape into regular-sized units that represent similar source levels of community exposure to wildfire risk. Subfiresheds are approximately 25,000-acre accounting units nested within firesheds. This data publication includes three separate geodatabases, one for the conterminous United States (CONUS), one for Alaska, and one for Hawaii. All three geodatabases contain both firesheds and subfiresheds. See metadata for the individual geodatabases and feature classes for more details.
The fireshed and subfireshed boundaries are designed to delineate hotspots of fire transmission to adjacent or nearby communities to facilitate cohesive cross-boundary risk mitigation planning.
This data publication is the fourth edition of the Fireshed Registry. The first edition included the conterminous United States (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2020-0054). The second edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2020-0054-2) was created to include firesheds and project areas for Alaska. The third edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2020-0054-3) changed the name of fireshed "project areas" to "subfiresheds". This fourth edition includes firesheds and subfiresheds for Hawaii; corrects 23 duplicated fireshed names in the CONUS dataset; updates 89 additional names in the CONUS dataset so that the named place used as the fireshed name is actually located in the state having the fireshed's majority area; and removes building exposure and disturbance estimates from the attribute tables of the firesheds and subfiresheds. The smoothed building exposure rasters for the continental United States that were used to calculate the exposure attributes can be found in the data publication https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0015-3. The Alaska dataset is unchanged from previous versions.