Color by cause
General cause, classification, age category, owner, agency, source type, size class, year or month. Click the legend to isolate or hide a value.
USFS Research Data Archive · 7th Edition
Every U.S. wildfire ignition, on one map.
Explore 33 years of reported fire starts by cause, size, year and place. Filter, chart and download, right in your browser.
33years of records, 1992–2024
9fields to color ignitions by
4regions: Lower 48, AK, HI, PR
4export formats
Features
Built for asking “why did this start?”
A browser-only explorer. No account, no backend, no waiting on a server to draw your filters.
Filter anything
Year, day of year, cause, size class, acreage, state, county, owner and agency. Every filter and the viewport live in the URL, so any view is shareable.
Charts that follow the map
Fires per year by category, a month × category heatmap, rankings and size-class distribution. Limit them to the visible extent.
Animate the years
Play 1992 to 2024 at your speed, or switch to cumulative mode to watch ignitions accumulate.
Map the way you want
Fixed, zoom-scaled or fire-size radius. Heatmap weighted by count or size. Light, dark and USGS satellite basemaps.
Take the data with you
Export CSV, GeoJSON, Parquet or a PNG. Each file records the filters, date and source, plus the official citation.
How it works
From map to answer in three steps
Open the map
Start from the Lower 48, or jump to Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico.
Slice by cause and time
Pick a color field and narrow with filters. Counts and charts update with the map.
Share or export
Copy the URL for the exact view, or download the filtered records.
The data
Wildfire Occurrence Data, FPA-FOD
Compiled by the USDA Forest Service from federal, state and local fire reporting systems. This site is an independent viewer of the published dataset.
1992–2024Point locationsNWCG cause codesOpen access
Short, Karen C. 2026. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2024 [FPA_FOD_20260615]. 7th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive.