Smoothed raster of wildfire transmission to buildings in the continental United States and Hawaii: 4th edition

Recent fire seasons in the United States have prompted federal agencies to explore strategies for expanding fuel management and forest restoration in areas where wildfires ignite and spread to buildings in nearby communities. This data publication includes three geodatabase rasters that represent spatial assessments across the conterminous United States, Alaska, and Hawaii of the potential for wildfires to ignite, spread, and expose buildings. The rasters provide smoothed estimates of annual building exposure from wildfire. They were created by intersecting simulated wildfire perimeters with building location data over 10,000 to 100,000 simulated fire seasons. The assessment reflects 2020 vegetation and fuel conditions and 2023 building locations. These data support scenario planning efforts to design fuel treatment programs that target wildfire exposure to developed areas. The national-scale extent of the data enables broader application of scenario planning science to analyze and communicate potential large-scale expansions of forest and fuel management initiatives.Wildfire impacts to developed areas have stimulated wide-ranging policy discussions about the role of active forest management to reduce hazardous fuels on federal and private wildlands. An assessment of areas that have the highest likelihood to ignite fires that spread to buildings in developed areas is needed. These spatial data were used to estimate sources of wildfire ignitions that spread to and expose communities to help highlight areas that could be targeted for fuels reduction treatments and other risk mitigation efforts.The first edition of these data was published on 03/10/2022 (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0015). The second edition changed the raster values to be per pixel values instead of per acre values (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0015-2). The third edition added the corresponding exposure raster for Alaska (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0015-3). This new (fourth) edition adds the corresponding building exposure raster for Hawaii, and all three rasters reflect updated data on building locations and vegetation and fuels conditions from those used in previous editions. Layer files are also provided, which allow the matching of the symbology to the PNG files included in this package.