The Fireshed Registry: Fireshed and subfireshed boundaries for the continental United States and Alaska: 3rd 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 (CONUS) and Alaska. 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 Alaska. 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 two separate geodatabases, one for CONUS and one for Alaska, both geodatabases containing both firesheds and subfiresheds: boundaries, size, total annual number of buildings inside and outside of the area exposed by wildfires ignited within the area (based on 2014 fuels conditions), and percent of the area that has been disturbed since 2014 (2015-2018). 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 third edition of the Fireshed Registry. The first edition included the continental United States (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2020-0054). The second edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2020-0054-2) was created only to include firesheds and project areas for Alaska. This third edition changes the name of fireshed "project areas" to "subfiresheds"; the data for CONUS have not been modified from previous versions. This third edition was published on 07/30/2024. Minor metadata updates were made on 11/20/2024.