Levin, Noam; Yebra, Marta; Phinn, Stuart R (2021): Australia's Black Summer wildfires [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.939064

In this dataset we provide various metrics for the Black Summer wildfires of Australia (September 2019 - mid February 2020), whose area was larger than 100 sq.km. To this end we treated each wildfire as a wildfire event, and extracted various metrics which are either based on the polygon of the extent of the wildfire, or on the approximate ignition point of that wildfire. Our aim was to understand the climatic, vegetation and anthropogenic variables which might explain the wildfires - their spatial and temporal extent, the burn severity etc. The data was collected from a wide range of (mostly) public freely available datasets, full references provided in our publication mentioned below.

This dataset includes the burn date of all Black Summer wildfires of Australia (September 2019 - mid February 2020) based on MODIS and VIIRS, polygons of the largest (> 100 sq.km.) fires (n = 391), and their approximate ignition points. In addition the excel file contains 10 response variables of the fires, and a range of climatic, vegetation and anthropogenic explanatory variables we used to study these fires.

File name Type Content

BlackSummer391fires.mpk ArcGIS Map Package GIS layers as detailed below with their symbology

burndate_segment_win3_var75_sim5_poly_NL_ds_gt100.shp ESRI shapefile Polygons of 391 large wildfires

MCD_Sep2Jan_fires_pnt_in.shp ESRI shapefile Approximate locations of ignitions of the 391 wildfires based on their burn dates

Burndate_V1_MCD.rst Terrset raster file Burn date of grid cells during Australia's Black Summer, based on VIIRS and MODIS

Agri2018_WUI.tif TIF raster file 2018 Wildland Urban Interface based on Land Use and Management Information for Australia

Agri2018_FAI.tif TIF raster file 2018 Forest Agricultural Interface based on Land Use and Management Information for Australia

DLCD_2015_WUI.tif TIF raster file 2015 Wildland Urban Interface based on Dynamic Land Cover Dataset Version 2.1

DLCD_2015_FGI.tif TIF raster file 2015 Forest Grassland Interface based on Dynamic Land Cover Dataset Version 2.1

DLCD_2015_FAI.tif TIF raster file 2015 Forest Agricultural Interface based on Dynamic Land Cover Dataset Version 2.1

All 391 fires 2upload.xlsx Excel file Tables with the response variables and explanatory variables of each of the 391 wildfires. Time series of FRP, burnt area, FDI, LFMC, VHI, PV+NPV and daily rainfall for each of the 391 wildfires.