MTBS has published 413 new fires to MTBS.gov. This data release contains 2018 fires from 15 western states including AK. The full release of the 2018 data is anticipated to occur by the end of fall 2020. With this release the MTBS data record now spans 1984 through 2018. This data release also contains revisions of previously release mappings from previous fire years, bringing the total number of fires mapped by the project to 23,372.
On June 25, 2020, the "Changes to the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program mapping production procedures and data products" paper was released in the journal Fire Ecology (https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-020-00076-y). This paper describes how the MTBS program's burned area and burn severity mapping methods have changed through time, and how these changes subsequently affect the burned area and burn severity products. Overall, we found that remapped MTBS products can be significantly different from
The complete dataset for the nationwide 2018 fires is anticipated to be released by the end of August 2020. MTBS is currently developing and will publish a tentative schedule for future data releases. Please check back here for additional updates.
