Roadless status under The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is not associated with increased wildfire in the US National Forest System

Archive description This archive contains the fire severity datasets, geometries, and forest mask layers used in the research manuscript: "Roadless status under The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is not associated with increased wildfire in the US National Forest System". The raster datasets are co-registered to the same equal-area coordinate reference system (EPSG:5070) with a 30m resolution. The code used to process and to analyze the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) and the USFS geospatial boundaries can be found on GitHub. This repository contains the final, formatted data layers that were used to compute the values presented in the associated research letter. Data descriptions western_states.tif: These are the rasterized 30m state boundaries. The states were encoded as integers: (1) Arizona, (2) California, (3) Colorado, (4) Idaho, (5) Montana, (6) Nevada, (7) New Mexico, (8) Oregon, (9) Utah, (10) Washington, (11) Wyoming. access_class_gpkgs.zip: This zip file contains GeoPackage files that contain the Developed and Roadless, Inventoried Roadless Areas, and the congressionally designated wilderness areas that intersect any of the 11 western states. nfs_access_proportions.tif: This is the raster that contains the rasterized 30 m US National Forest System access categories: roaded/developed areas, inventoried roadless areas, and congressionally-designated wilderness areas. The proportion of coverage of each access class in each 30m cell was computed. Proportions were stored as integers (0-100). nlcd_forest_mask_1984_2024_mosaic.tif: This is a binary, forest/non-forest mask that was derived from annual National Land Cover Dataset landcover rasters (1984-2024). Forested areas were defined as any location that was classified by NLCD as forested (i.e., deciduous, evergreen, or mixed-forest cover) in any year of the land cover time series. mtbs_severity_annual.zip: This zip file the contains the annual composites of the individual Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity rasters that were summarized in our analysis. The annual composites were exported from Google Earth Engine. Our analysis only utilized classes 1 (unburned to low severity), 2 (low severity), 3 (moderate severity), and 4 (high severity). Data sources The MTBS data were accessed via the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform on 2025-12-15. The NFS access categories were derived from the USDA Forest Service FSGeodata Clearinghouse: Administrative Forest Boundaries Roadless Areas: 2001, Idaho, and Colorado Rules Combined National Wilderness Areas US Census Bureau TIGER/Line Shapefiles (downloaded on Aug 10, 2025) Research paper Manuscript DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.70411