Public Distribution
With the retirement of the GeoMAC website for data hosting and public data distribution in 2019, another method of delivering incident geospatial information to the public was needed. The Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Service (WFIGS) Group provides authoritative geospatial data products under the interagency Wildland Fire Data Program. Hosted in the NIFC Org, WFIGS provides both internal and public-facing data, accessible in a variety of formats. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) “Open Data” site creates a publicly accessible, searchable website. Open Data sites make authoritative data easy to find and access in multiple commonly used formats. Making perimeters that have been approved for sharing with the public accessible through the NIFC Open Data site has a number of key benefits:
- Users can access the data in their preferred format – shapefile, geodatabase, spreadsheet, or several flavors of web service.
- Perimeter data can be shared from the same site as other wildland fire reference data, including dispatch boundaries, Geographic Area boundaries, and predictive service areas.
- Open Data sites are cloud-hosted and scale to the load put on them, depending on traffic, reducing the cost, and management workload of providing public-facing data.
The NIFC Open Data site URL is http://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/ and requires no login or password.
Datasets
The following data sets are publicly available through the NIFC Open Data Site. Details can be found in the description of each service on the site.
WFIGS - Current Wildland Fire Locations
Point locations for wildfires, complexes, and prescribed fires expected to be active based on their size and most recent update.
WFIGS - Current Wildland Fire Perimeters
Perimeters for recent and ongoing fires in the United States. A perimeter must have a corresponding Current Wildland Fire Location and corresponding IRWINID to be visible.
WFIGS – 2022 Wildland Fire Locations to Date
Point locations for all wildfires, complexes, and prescribed fires to date in the calendar year.
WFIGS – 2022 Wildland Fire Perimeters to Date
Best available perimeters for all wildfires and prescribed fires to date in the calendar year.
WFIGS – Last 24 Hour Wildland Fire Locations
Point Locations for wildland fires in the United States reported in the last 24 hours.
Historic Operational Data
National Incident Feature Service (NIFS) data archives from previous calendar years. Datasets contain all edits made to the NIFS Sensitive fields and features have been removed.
WFIGS – Wildland Fire Locations Full History
Point locations for all reported wildland fires in the United States. This dataset is an ongoing project compiled from current and historical sources and as such, may be incomplete.
WFIGS – Wildland Fire Perimeters Full History
Perimeters for all reported wildland fires in the United States. This dataset is an ongoing project compiled from current and historical sources and as such, may be incomplete.