A Product Quality Control and Assessment (PQCA) Plan was developed by the PQWT and accepted by the LANDFIRE (LF) Leadership Team and LF Executive Oversight Committee. The plan includes quality control procedures for production processes as well as a product quality assessment approach where applicable. For details of the assessment approach, please download and review the PQCA Plan currently posted for the Western U.S. Milestone.

In short, the LF products quantitatively assessed under the PQCA Plan are those that are modeled directly from geo-referenced field plots contained in the LF Reference Data Base (LFRDB). This includes the Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) and Environmental Site Potential (ESP) products for the Western U.S. Milestone (WUS). For the Eastern U.S. (EUS) and Alaska/Hawaii (AK/HI) Milestones, only the EVT layer is assessed, due to changes in ESP mapping methods. Canopy Fuels and Fire Behavior Fuel Model (FBFM) spatial products are also assessed under the PQCA plan for EUS and WUS, although with different methods than those used for EVT. Canopy Fuels and FBFM were not assessed in AK/HI.

Many of the product quality assessment results are presented by Super Zones, which are aggregations of individual LF mapping zones. Super Zones represent areas with large enough sample sizes to enable meaningful inferences about product quality, given the sampling design used to withhold field plots for product quality assessment. See the PQCA Plan for more detail on the holdout sample design and the use of super zones in the product quality assessment process.

For U.S. mapping zones, results are summarized in six reports as follows: 

Eastern U.S. 

The LANDFIRE National Eastern Milestone Agreement Assessment Summary presents the overall agreement for the East at a summary level by super zone.

The LANDFIRE National Eastern Milestone Agreement Assessment Super Zone Analysis presents more detailed information about agreement for specific mapped classes within individual super zones in the East.

Western U.S.

The LANDFIRE National Western Milestone Agreement Assessment Summary presents the overall agreement for the West at a summary level by super zone.

The LANDFIRE National Western Milestone Agreement Assessment Super Zone Analysis presents more detailed information about agreement for specific mapped classes within individual super zones in the West.

Alaska/Hawaii

The LANDFIRE National AK/HI Milestone Agreement Assessment Summary presents the overall agreement for Alaska and Hawaii at a summary level by super zone.

The LANDFIRE National AK/HI Milestone Agreement Assessment Super Zone Analysis presents more detailed information about agreement for specific mapped classes within individual super zones in Alaska and Hawaii.

A graphic of the United States separated into zones

Product Description

This page includes a general description of the product, please consult the schedule and version pages for information specific to each release.

LANDFIRE’s Annual Disturbance products represent LANDFIRE’s comprehensive yearly assessment of landscape change across all lands in the United States (extending 90 km into Canada and Mexico) and U.S. territories. Disturbances - such as wildfires, vegetation removal or treatments, insect and disease damage, and other natural or management activities - shape ecosystems and influence vegetation structure, fuel conditions, habitats, and long-term ecological processes. The Annual Disturbance suite of products tracks and maps this change so land managers, scientists, planners, and analysts can make informed decisions.

In application, annual disturbance information serves a diverse number of roles, such as developing Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) for wildfire risk management, prioritizing fuels reduction and restoration activities, and monitoring forest health metrics in response to insect and disease outbreaks. Additionally, disturbance data is crucial because it acts as the "steering wheel" for updating LANDFIRE’s fuels and vegetation maps. For example, a high-severity fire or clearcut will transition a forest grid cell into an early-successional state (shrub/herbaceous), whereas a low-severity burn might only reduce the surface fuels while leaving the forest canopy intact.

To ensure these products remain versatile for varied applications, the disturbance information is standardized with key attributes that define its origin, timing, and impact. This structure allows users to effectively filter, query, and analyze landscape change across all GeoAreas. Each mapped disturbance is attributed with the following core information:

  • Disturbance Year: Fiscal and calendar
  • Disturbance Type: e.g., wildfire, mechanical treatment, insect/disease
  • Severity: Magnitude of impact on the landscape’s vegetation
  • Severity Source: Fire program data, Event submission, or remotely sensed change
  • Detailed Descriptions: Plain-language descriptions of each attribute/value

LF 2016 Remap and beyond includes a 90-kilometer buffer along the 1,500 miles of the eastern and southern borders AK shares with Canada. Then with the LF 2020 update, and future updates, for the Conterminous United States (CONUS) a 90-kilometer buffer into Mexico is also included.

 

Image of the upper northwest corner of the U.S. with color-coded disturbance areas

 

Flyout map of color-coded LF2024 annual disturbance models for CONUS, AK and HI
Map showing color-coded LF2024 annual disturbance models for CONUS, Alaska and Hawaii

Annual Disturbance Products

Release flow diagram

Annual Disturbance Legend Crosswalk (LDist, PDist, Dist)

Product Version Comparison Table

Annual Disturbance Product Breakdown

 

Limited Annual Disturbance - Single Release

Limited Annual Disturbance (LDist) made its debut with the LF 2023 Update. LDist provides a “first look” at the previous fiscal year’s reported disturbance and treatment polygons (events) and does not include change detected from satellite imagery. It incorporates submitted disturbance and treatment polygons that arrived before the start-of-year processing cutoff (November 1), and fire program data available up to mid-December. LDist is composed of data from the following sources:

  • Fire program rasters and burn severity: Four possible sources, including Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG), and Landsat-derived Burned Area (BA).
  • Event polygon datasets: Submitted from two national contributors - the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the National Park Service (NPS).
  • Online national Event datasets: Obtained from the USDA Forest Service Activity Tracking System (FACTS), National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), USFS National Insect and Disease Risk Map (NIDRM), and the Interior Fuels and Post-fire Reporting System (IFPRS).

LDist is typically released from late January to mid-February, depending on data availability and processing timelines. It is provided as four datasets (CONUS, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico/The Virgin Islands).

Preliminary Annual Disturbance - Incremental Release

PDist expands upon LDist by incorporating:

  • Remotely sensed disturbance detections from satellite imagery.
  • Image-based severity estimates for disturbance and treatment polygons (events) and satellite-detected disturbances.

PDist is considered the second “draft” and is released incrementally by GeoArea shortly after processing is complete. The PDist product featured in the current version will be used to update the Vegetation and Fuel (including Fuel Disturbance) products included in releases throughout the rest of the year.

Annual Disturbance - Single Release

Dist is the complete and final disturbance layer for the year. It incorporates:

  • All data from LDist and PDist, including remotely sensed changes and severity assignments. 
  • National online disturbance and treatment polygon (events) submissions from the previous fiscal year that missed the initial submission deadline; this second data retrieval takes place during June and July.
  • Fire program data from the previous fiscal year not available for inclusion in LDist or PDist, finalized during June and July.

Dist is LANDFIRE’s final and authoritative annual record of disturbance. It is important to note that the late-arriving disturbance and treatment polygons included in the Dist product are not incorporated into the current year’s Fuel Disturbance (FDist) or other fuel, vegetation, and fire regime products; those products are updated using the PDist product.
 

Annual Disturbance Resources

Product Details

The Disturbance and Treatment Polygons (Events) is a collection of natural disturbance and land management activities used to determine disturbance causality in LF products and can be used in change detection analysis. Disturbance and Treatment Polygons (Events) Geodatabase contains over 2.9 million polygons from 1999-2024 across the United States and U.S. territories.

The Disturbance and Treatment Polygons (Events) includes contributions from:

  • Federal
  • State
  • Local
  • Private Organizations 

Disturbance and Treatment Polygons (Events) include a feature dataset for Alaska (AK), CONUS, Hawaii (HI), and the island territories of Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Guam/Northern Mariana (GUCNMI), Palau (PW), and Puerto Rico/U.S. Virgin Islands (PRVI).

Each feature dataset contains two feature classes, namely Raw DTP and Model Ready DTP. The Raw and Model Ready DTP feature classes include disturbance and vegetation/fuel treatment data.

In addition to the feature classes there is also a look up table for the source code, which is an attribute in all feature classes. The source code is a LANDFIRE internal code assigned to each data source. Please consult the Look Up Table link for more information about the data sources included and excluded from this release.

Look Up Table

Download
Certain proprietary and/or sensitive data were removed in this public geodatabase. The lutSource_Code is a table which is an attribute in all feature classes. Consult the table "lutSource_Code" for more information about the data sources.

Improvements

LANDFIRE is no longer producing the exotics polygon layer, and it is no longer included in the Disturbance and Treatment Polygons (Events) geodatabase. You can still access the LF 2023 Exotics polygon data which includes Exotics data from 1999-2023 on the LF Map Viewer.

Beginning with the LF 2022 Update, LANDFIRE started re-collecting disturbance and treatment polygons June 1 each year from online National data sources. These sources include Forest Service Activity Tracking System (FACTS), National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), USFS National Insect and Disease Risk Map (NIDRM), and Interior Fuels and Post-Fire Reporting System (IFPRS). Updated data is pulled from these sources and any new treatments or disturbances are added. For LF 2022, LANDFIRE added 6.5 million acres of disturbance and treatment polygons to the LF Raw DTP product upon re-collection. For a grand total of ~28 million acres of Raw DTP data featured within the LF 2022 Update.
 

Select your GeoArea of interest from the list below to download the LF 2016 Public version of the LF Reference Database.

Picture of the U.S., AK, HI with zone maps indicated.

GeoAreas

A public version of the LANDFIRE (LF) 2016 Remap Reference Database (LFRDB) is available. The LFRDB contains a subset of the data and attributes used for LF National and LF Remap production. The Public LFRDB includes vegetation and fuel data that were largely amassed from existing information resources such as:

  • USFS Vegetation and Fuel Plot Data
  • USGS National Gap Analysis Program (GAP)
  • NPS Inventory and Monitoring (I&M)
  • State Inventory Data

Updated plot information was compiled for LF Remap and used to inform existing vegetation mapping. This new data was added to the public LFRDB for LF Remap.

Note: The latest LFRDB is LF 2016 Remap.

Data archived in the LF Remap Public LFRDB include:

VegetationFuel
  • natural community occurrences
  • estimates of canopy cover and height per plant taxon
  • measurements of individual trees
  • occurrence of exotics plants
  • biomass estimates of downed woody material
  • depth or biomass estimates of litter and duff layers
  • percentage cover and height of shrub and herb layers

Major Public LFRDB attributes derived from the sampling data include:

  • Ecological System and NVCS Group labels
  • Lifeform cover and height estimates
  • Predictor data extracted from ancillary data layers and used for mapping

Certain proprietary and/or sensitive data were removed in the public database. Consult the table lutdtVisitsSourceID in the database regarding data sources.

The Public LFRDB can be used as input to spatial and non-spatial vegetation models and is applicable for ground truthing and accuracy assessments for a variety of modeling and mapping efforts.


 

LANDFIRE Technical Documentation

A detailed description of the processes that went into the LF 2016 Remap effort and the methods for creating each LF product. 

View Documentation

LANDFIRE Dictionary

A “one-stop shop” general resource that provides information about products, Attribute Data Dictionaries (ADDs), data and metadata, and terms. 

View Dictionary

LF Definitions, Quality, and Standards

Provides information about contributors, metadata and data standards, data creation, and data testing. This document also provides details about our general data release process.
 

View Document

LANDFIRE Research Review

LANDFIRE welcomes researchers to share work that incorporates LANDFIRE Program Products for a friendly, informal review—at any stage of development.
 

Learn More

Product Description

Map of LF 2020 CONUS Operational RoadsThe LANDFIRE Operational Roads product was introduced in LF 2020 and is intended to support fire operations. In the Operational Roads product, all known roads are represented. This product includes all pixels from the four roads classes within the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2021 Developed Imperviousness Descriptor product for the Conterminous United States (CONUS) including all pixels of primary (Value 20), secondary (Value 21), tertiary (Value 22), and thinned (Value 23) roads. The NLCD roads layer incorporates other major federal road layers such as commercial roads data.

The Operational Roads product addresses the need for a roads layer that provides comprehensive coverage of existing roads of all sizes. It can be used with other spatial data layers to assist users with decisions on access and egress for firefighting equipment, control points for fighting fires, or potential evacuation routes.

How is the Operational Roads product different from the Developed-Roads class within other products?

Unlike the Operational Roads product, the developed-roads class represented in the LANDFIRE vegetation (Existing Vegetation Type (EVT), Cover (EVC), and Height (EVH)) and fuel products (e.g. Canopy Cover (CC) and Height (CH)) is trumped by overlapping vegetation. For example, if there is both vegetation and a road present in a pixel during the creation of the EVT product then the vegetation takes priority, and the pixel is assigned a specific vegetation type class, rather than a developed-roads class.

Additionally, the smallest NLCD roads class, thinned roads (Value 23), was not used in the developed-roads class within vegetation and fuels products.

A particular pixel's vegetation designation also gets used in assigning fuels. This can result in "broken roads" but is helpful for understanding fuels continuity when modeling fire behavior. The Operational Roads layer contains no "broken roads" and is not focused on fuel continuity.

Operational Roads in Alaska in LF 2020 involved combining NLCD 2016 Urban Descriptor for Alaska and a commercially available roads dataset by buffering the roads by 15m, rasterizing them, and adding them to the NLCD roads. Where NLCD and the commercial data overlapped, NLCD was used. Commercial data roads classes were translated to NLCD primary, secondary, tertiary, and thinned roads based on the descriptions, whether it was paved, and speed categories.

Operational Roads in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam in LF 2020 were derived from the 2017 US Census Bureau TIGER lines (US Census Bureau, 2017) and include pixels within 15m of the road lines. The lines were buffered by 15m and then converted to raster using the "recode" field to designate the new pixel values.