State of Wildfires 2025-26: Protected Areas Exposure to Fire

This dataset supports the State of Wildfires 2025-26 report under review at Earth System Science Data (Burton et al., 2026, under review). The dataset provides annual data summaries and final-year anomalies in the exposure of global protected areas to wildland fires. Annual data relate to the global fire season defined as March-February (e.g., March 2025-February 2026), aligning with an annuall lull in the global fire calendar. The complete methodology is described by Burton et al. (2026). Input data Burned areas from NASA's MODIS MCD64A1 Collection 6.1 Burned Area product (Giglio et al., 2018) available at Giglio et al. (2021). MODIS MCD12Q1 Collection 6.1 Land Cover product (Sulla-Menashe et al., 2019) available at Friedl and Sulla-Menashe (2022) to filter for semi-natural, burnable vegetation areas. Protected areas dataset derived from Resco De Dios et al. (2025) and updated to the March 2026 version of the Protected Planet’s World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) (UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, 2026). Regional Analysis We performed "cookie-cutting" (spatial and temporal masking) of the above input data sets to features in each of the regional layers descriped in Burton et al. (2026). Citation Work utilizing our regional summaries should cite both Burton et al. (2026) and the previous reference on the global analysis of protected areas, as follows: Resco De Dios, V., Cunill Camprubí, À., Campos-Arceiz, A., Clarke, H., He, Y., Zveushe, O. K., Domènech, R., Ying, H., & Yao, Y. (2025). Protected Areas Show Substantial and Increasing Risk of Wildfire Globally. Fire, 8(10), 405. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire8100405