LANDFIRE: National Maps of Vegetation, Fuel and Fire Across U.S. Lands

This page is based on a U.S. Geological Survey fact sheet written as LANDFIRE was preparing to move to annual updates starting in 2023.

LANDFIRE, short for Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools, is a key national source of map data for planning and analysis in fire and land management. It was the first complete, nationally consistent collection of more than 25 geospatial layers, databases and ecological models, at a resolution of 30 meters, describing disturbance, vegetation, fire and fuel. Because fires ignore property lines, the products are designed to work across all lands in the conterminous United States, Alaska, Hawaii and the insular areas.

Fire ecologists discuss wildfire impacts. Image from the USGS fact sheet.

Why it exists

The project began almost 20 years before the fact sheet, when agencies needed consistent, wall-to-wall national maps of fuel and vegetation to support a national strategy for wildfires that were growing larger and more extreme. Its maps have informed fire modeling and decision support systems from the start, helping predict how fires will spread and where to place firefighting resources. With longer fire seasons, more destructive fires and more people living where homes meet wildland, the USGS sees LANDFIRE as more relevant than ever.

How it is used

LANDFIRE scientists combine the latest remote sensing, mapping and automation with scientific data and methods. Land managers use the products to:

• choose where to treat fuels and improve forest health
• assess the risk to communities
• analyze potential fire behavior and run planning simulations
• predict fire effects, such as where smoke will go and how concentrated the pollution will be
• locate hazards such as snags

All of this can improve firefighter safety and make wildfire response more effective.

An example of wildfire risk to communities, from Wildfire Risk to Communities. Image from the USGS fact sheet.

Not only fire. Many of the inputs to the fire and fuel products are useful on their own. Vegetation data have supported prairie restoration, wildlife habitat inventories, carbon balance studies, the Gap Analysis Project and research on how a warming climate affects streamside vegetation. Reference data have been used to predict the spread of non-native plants, study how roads fragment forests and understand pollinator ecology. University researchers used LANDFIRE's biophysical settings data to trace how dryland habitats have changed since before European settlement and what industrialized agriculture did to traditional ecosystems. And the U.S. Forest Service's Wildfire Risk to Communities website, created at the direction of Congress, uses LANDFIRE vegetation and fuel data to map community risk and help communities reduce it.

What it produces

The first product, LANDFIRE National, was finished in 2009. The whole country was later remapped ("LF 2016 Remap") to improve the base maps, and updated layers are released regularly to keep up with wildfires, logging, vegetation growth, weather events and urban spread. Updates draw on remotely sensed imagery, fire program data, and treatment and management records contributed by federal, state, local, private and nonprofit land managers. Anyone can contribute plot, polygon or pixel data.

A tractor plowing native rangeland to make cropland near Winnett, Montana, 1983 — the kind of change LANDFIRE's disturbance products track. Image from the USGS fact sheet.

A tractor discing a stubble field in Montana to prepare it for planting. Image from the USGS fact sheet.

Annual updates. Advances in image processing and data access let LANDFIRE move to an annual approach starting in 2023, adding the previous year's disturbances to the base products in a few months instead of several years, so new data are ready for the next fire season.

Recent improvements included a 90-kilometer buffer into Canada and Mexico; topography recalculated from 3D Elevation Program data, with corrected aspect; roads and urban classes from the latest National Land Cover Dataset; standalone operational roads products that help identify access corridors, evacuation routes and fire lines; new burnable classes for areas with few buildings; modeled vegetation types in place of pixels once labeled "recently disturbed"; and agricultural classes adjusted with the Cropland Data Layer, with nonirrigated federal farmland moved to a burnable fuel model.

A note on scale

Although the data come as 30-meter pixels, LANDFIRE is built for large-landscape analysis, national or regional strategic planning, or large subregions and fire management units. How well it works for smaller areas depends on the product, the place and the project, so users should check that the data suit their purpose.

Getting the data

The products are free. Users can clip and download areas from the Map Viewer, download full layers for the conterminous United States, Alaska, Hawaii and the insular areas, stream layers through web services (WMS, WCS and Esri Image Service), or request custom files through the LANDFIRE Product Service. The program promises standardized legends and methods across all lands, regular updates, ready-to-use data and user support from the LANDFIRE Help Desk at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

LANDFIRE is sponsored by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council. Its principal partners are the Department of the Interior (the USGS and the Office of Wildland Fire), the USDA Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy.

Sources

• U.S. Geological Survey, "LANDFIRE," Fact Sheet 2023–3044. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/fs20233044/full
• LANDFIRE: https://landfire.gov/ (data: https://landfire.gov/getdata.php); "The New Age of LANDFIRE": https://geonarrative.usgs.gov/the-new-age-of-landfire/; Wildfire Risk to Communities: https://www.wildfirerisk.org/; Adhikari and others (2019).
• Pictures recovered from the fact sheet PDF.