Oregon fire and drought yearly summaries, 2000–2025

Schema and provenance

Derived from three public sources. Fire tables aggregate the Oregon Department of Forestry fire occurrence extract (data.oregon.gov; 26,817 ignition records on ODF-protected lands, 2000–2025). MTBS tables aggregate the national Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity perimeter shapefile (mtbs.gov), reprojected to EPSG:5070, geometry-repaired, and filtered to polygons intersecting Oregon. Drought tables aggregate the U.S. Drought Monitor weekly statewide DSCI series for Oregon (droughtmonitor.unl.edu). Cleaning and aggregation were performed in R (tidyverse, sf, lubridate); the cleaning script is colocated with the investigation source. No values were imputed; empty cause and source fields were recoded to "Unknown".

Six comma-clean CSVs, one row per year (or per year–group), no quoted fields, no missing values in the 2000–2025 window.

fire-year-summary.csv — one row per year from the ODF occurrence data: Year; odf_ignitions (count of recorded fires); odf_acres (sum of estimated total acres); odf_median_acres; odf_max_fire_acres (largest single fire that year); fires_human, fires_lightning, fires_under_invest (counts by ODF’s HumanOrLightning field); human_share (fires_human / odf_ignitions).

fire-county-year-summary.csv — the same ODF aggregation broken out by Year and County: fires_total, acres_total, max_fire_acres, fires_human, fires_lightning, fires_under_invest.

fire-cause-year-summary.csv — ODF fires grouped by Year, Source (Human / Lightning / Under Invest), and GeneralCause (ODF’s cause category: Equipment Use, Debris Burning, Recreation, and so on): fires_total, acres_total.

mtbs-year-summary.csv — one row per year from Oregon-intersecting MTBS perimeters: Year; mtbs_large_fire_count; mtbs_large_fire_acres (summed mapped burned area); mtbs_max_fire_acres. MTBS maps large fires only and publishes with a lag of a year or more — the 2025 row reflects a single mapped perimeter and will rise as perimeters are released.

drought-year-summary.csv — one row per year from the weekly DSCI series (0–500 scale; higher is worse): drought_dsci_year_mean plus seasonal means drought_dsci_spring_mean (Mar–May), drought_dsci_june_mean, drought_dsci_summer_mean (Jun–Aug), drought_dsci_fire_mean (May–Sep), and drought_dsci_max (worst week of the year).

fire-climate-joined-year.csv — the story table: all three yearly summaries left-joined on Year, 2000–2025, eighteen columns.

What these tables cannot tell you: ODF fields cover ODF-protected lands only, so federal-jurisdiction fires appear only through MTBS; DSCI is a statewide average that flattens regional differences; and estimated acres in the ODF extract are administrative estimates, not mapped footprints. None of this data is suitable for operational fire or evacuation decisions.

Verify downloads against the published checksums with shasum -a 256 <file>, or run npm run verify:datasets in the repository.