LANDFIRE: The Federal Maps of Vegetation, Fuels and Disturbance Behind Wildfire Models

LANDFIRE is a federal program that maps disturbance, vegetation, fuels and historical conditions across the whole country in unusual detail. It's run by the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service, operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), with The Nature Conservancy as a partner. The data are free at landfire.gov.

How the maps are made

LANDFIRE assigns disturbance, vegetation, fuel and fire regime classes to every 30-meter pixel of U.S. land. To map vegetation types — by ecological system and by U.S. National Vegetation Classification group — it matches field plots to satellite reflectance, mostly from Landsat, the basis of its mapping since 2004, and extends the classes to pixels that look alike.

Its machine learning models are trained on plot data in the LANDFIRE Reference Database, drawn from many sources, including:

• the Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis
• the National Park Service's Inventory and Monitoring Program
• the Natural Resources Conservation Service's National Resources Inventory
• the Bureau of Land Management's Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring strategy
• state Natural Heritage Program data

Fighting wildfire

Wildfire hazard based on LANDFIRE 2014 fuels and topography. Image from the USGS fact sheet

LANDFIRE data underpin wildfire hazard and risk studies — firesheds, potential operational delineations (PODs) and national risk assessments.

• FSim, a widely used fire behavior model, needs LANDFIRE fuel models, canopy data and topography to run.
• Most large wildfires are managed by federal interagency incident commands using the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS), whose spatial fire behavior models — Basic Fire Behavior, Near-Term Fire Behavior and Fire Spread Probability (FSPro) — all require LANDFIRE fuel and topography layers.

Wildlife habitat

A fisher in the canopy of a national forest in California. Photograph by Zane Miller, Forest Service

An endangered red-cockaded woodpecker feeding its young in a longleaf pine in Georgia; restoring longleaf forests can help it recover. Photograph by John Maxwell, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Disturbance history

Ten years of disturbance types, 2006–2016. Image from the USGS fact sheet

• Annual disturbance layers, 1999–2020, record each disturbance's source, cause and severity, with notes on how it was determined — once just a step toward updating vegetation and fuel maps, now a rich resource in their own right.
• The Events Geodatabase holds more than 20 years of disturbance and treatment perimeters from local, state, federal and nonprofit partners — including the Forest Service's FACTS, NFPORS and the National Interagency Fire Center — with causes such as mechanical treatment, insects and disease, prescribed fire, wildfire and weather.

A look at the past

Biophysical settings estimate what the landscape probably looked like before European colonization, including its likely fire regimes. The Vegetation Departure layer measures how far today's vegetation has moved from that baseline — useful for setting restoration priorities.

Sources

Based on Inga P. La Puma and Timothy D. Hatten, LANDFIRE Data and Applications, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3034; a work of the United States government in the public domain.