Combined wildfire datasets for the United States and certain territories, 1800s-Present (summary rasters)

First, we would like to thank the wildland fire advisory group. Their wisdom and guidance helped us build the dataset as it currently exists. Currently, there are multiple, freely available wildland fire datasets that identify wildfire and prescribed fire areas across the United States. However, these datasets are all limited in some way. Time periods, spatial extents, attributes, and maintenance for these datasets are highly variable, and none of the existing datasets provide a comprehensive picture of wildfires that have burned since the 1800s. Utilizing a series of both manual processes and ArcGIS Python (arcpy) scripts, we merged 40 of these disparate datasets into a single dataset that encompasses the known wildfires within the United States from the 1800s to the present. These datasets were ranked by order of observed quality, and overlapping polygons in the same year were used individually or dissolved together with other polygons based on ranked quality (see individual steps in the polygon metadata for full details). The fire polygons were turned into 30 meter rasters representing various summary counts: (a) count of all wildland fires that burned a pixel, (b) count of wildfires that burned a pixel, (c) the first year a wildfire burned a pixel, (d) the most recent year a wildfire burned a pixel, and (e) count of prescribed fires that burned a pixel.