Wildfire Near Water Dataset

What this looks like

One real series from the dataset, and real rows from the head of its published extract. Neither is a mock-up: the rows below are the same rows, unchanged, that are in the file you would download.

Burned area within 50 km at Grand Lake Stream at Grand Lake Stream, Maine

The longest single series this dataset holds — 36 annual values, one of 1,356. The dataset is not this chart.

Drawn to show the shape and resolution of what the dataset contains, not to make a point about Grand Lake Stream at Grand Lake Stream, Maine. Gaps are breaks, never interpolated.

View the data behind this chart

Underlying data
Period	Grand Lake Stream at Grand Lake Stream, Maine (ha)
1984	0
1985	0
1986	0
1987	0
1988	0
1989	0
1990	0
1991	0
1992	0
1993	0
1994	0
1995	0
1996	0
1997	0
1998	0
1999	0
2000	0
2001	0
2002	0
2003	0
2004	0
2005	0
2006	0
2007	0
2008	0
2009	0
2010	0
2011	3.00
2012	0
2013	0
2014	0
2015	0
2016	0
2017	0
2018	0
2019	0

Sample rows

12 of 73,359 rows Taken from the start of observations-ecosystem-nifc-fire-perimeter-history.csv. These are sample rows, not the dataset.

Sample rows from the Wildfire Near Water Dataset extract
`metric_id`	`subject_id`	`subject_kind`	`censored`	`censor_operator`	`censor_threshold`	`censor_limit`	`censor_reported`	`unit`	`period_start`	`period_end`	`period_kind`	`basis`	`confidence`	`source_id`	`source_ref`	`qualifier`	`superseded`	`retrieved`
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1984-01-01	1984-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1985-01-01	1985-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1986-01-01	1986-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1987-01-01	1987-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1988-01-01	1988-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1989-01-01	1989-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1990-01-01	1990-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1991-01-01	1991-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1992-01-01	1992-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1993-01-01	1993-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1994-01-01	1994-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27
burned-area-within-50km	gauge-usgs-01019000	geography	—	—	—	—	—	ha	1995-01-01	1995-12-31	year	derived	medium	nifc-fire-perimeter-history	InterAgencyFirePerimeterHistory_All_Years_View	—	—	2026-08-27

Download these rows as CSV — the same twelve, with the column header, for testing a loader before committing to the full file.

Methodology

Fire perimeters are fetched from the Interagency Fire Perimeter History service with their centroids, and the mapped area of every perimeter whose centroid falls within fifty kilometres of a Hydrionis measurement point is summed by year. Method burned-area-within-radius 1.0.0, stored with basis derived. Areas are converted from the acres the publisher states to hectares. Years are filled with zeros across the whole span, because a year in which nothing burned in range is a real result of the calculation and a reader most wants continuity in the quiet years either side of a fire.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

A radius is not a catchment. A fire fifty kilometres away may be in another basin entirely, and one just outside the circle may sit directly upstream — the circle knows nothing about which way water flows.
The perimeter centroid stands in for the whole fire, so a long fire straddling the boundary is counted wholly in or wholly out.
Points within fifty kilometres of one another share fires. Their values are not independent and must never be summed.
Coverage ends in 2019 because the source layer does. Perimeters from 2020 are published separately and are not held, so this dataset must not be read as showing wildfire declining after 2019.
A zero means no mapped perimeter fell within the radius. It does not mean nothing burned: small fires and unmapped fires are absent from the source.
Nothing here measures water. Burned area near a gauge is not evidence of turbidity, sediment or nutrient change at it.

Coverage

Subjects	United States river gauges, boreholes, monitoring stations and reservoir sites with a mapped fire within 50 km — 1,356 held
Period	1984–2019
Units	ha
Update cadence	Irregularly, when the publisher releases
Identifier	`wildfire-near-water` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`burned-area-within-50km`	Burned area within 50 km Total mapped wildfire area in a year whose perimeter centroid lies within fifty kilometres of this measurement point.	ha	river-gauge, monitoring-station, borehole, reservoir-site

Rights and access

Licence position

Open. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Applies to material authored by US federal agencies. Third-party material carried within a federal product may be separately protected.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

National Interagency Fire Center — Interagency Fire Perimeter History, all years (US Government work — public domain)

Attribution and citation

Cite and reuse →

Two different obligations, deliberately kept apart. One is a condition of somebody else's licence; the other is a request Hydrionis has no standing to enforce.

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), Wildfire Near Water Dataset, version 1.0.0, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/data/datasets/wildfire-near-water/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on the compilation, the normalisation, the eligibility judgements or a chart. Where you use an unmodified published value, the publisher’s attribution is the one that is required; crediting Hydrionis as well is welcome and is not something Hydrionis can require of you.

Recommended, not required. Hydrionis does not claim rights over unmodified public data it relayed, and doing arithmetic on somebody else’s measurements does not make them Hydrionis’s. Cite the version and the access date: Wildfire Near Water Dataset changes as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without both cannot be checked later. Full guidance is on cite and reuse.

None of the contributing licences requires attribution. Crediting the publishers is still good practice and they are listed above.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-27

First release.

Method version: burned-area-within-radius 1.0.0

Additions

Burned area within 50 km of 1,881 United States measurement points, 1984–2019.

Use this data

Download ecosystem observations from NIFC (73,359 rows) (CSV)
Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/datasets/wildfire-near-water.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

Every bulk extract ships with a companion metadata file carrying this dataset’s version, its sources, their licences, the attribution you are required to give and the suggested citation — so the terms travel with the file rather than staying on this page.

About this data

The fields a professional user needs to judge whether this is fit for a particular purpose. Deliberately not a score.

About this data

Everything below is a property of the data rather than a rating of it. There is deliberately no single confidence score: how much a gap matters depends on what you are about to do with the series, and only you know that.

Source	National Interagency Fire Center — Interagency Fire Perimeter History, all years · US Government work — public domain
How the values came to exist	Mixed across the series — the basis is recorded on every individual value.
Period held	1984–2019
Known gaps	A radius is not a catchment. A fire fifty kilometres away may be in another basin entirely, and one just outside the circle may sit directly upstream — the circle knows nothing about which way water flows. The perimeter centroid stands in for the whole fire, so a long fire straddling the boundary is counted wholly in or wholly out. Points within fifty kilometres of one another share fires. Their values are not independent and must never be summed.
Continuity	Version 1.0.0, released 2026-08-27. 1 recorded version; breaking changes and corrections are listed in the changelog above.
Last read from the publisher	2026-08-27 · publisher updates irregularly, when the publisher releases
Redistribution	Permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced