Dataset of United States Incident Management Situation Reports from 2007 to 2021

Abstract

This paper presents a unique 15-year dataset of Incident Management Situation Reports (IMSR), which document daily wildland fire situations across ten geographical regions in the United States. The IMSR dataset includes summaries for each reported day on national and regional wildfire activities, wildfire-specific activities, and committed fire suppression resources (i.e., personnel and equipment). This dataset is distinct from other wildfire data sources as it provides daily information on national fire suppression resource utilization, national and regional preparedness levels, and management priority for each region and fire. We developed an open-source Java program, IMSR-Tool, to process 3,124 IMSR reports available from 2007 to 2021 to generate this structured IMSR dataset, which can be updated when future reports become available. The dataset presented here and its future extension enable researchers and practitioners to study historical wildfire activity and resource use across regions and time, examine fire management perceptions, evaluate strategies for fire prioritization and fire resource allocation, and exploit other broader usage to improve wildfire management and response in the United States.

Fig. 1

The spatial boundaries, names, and abbreviations of nine Geographic Area Coordination Centers responsible for wildfire management in the conterminous United States. Alaska (AICC; the tenth geographic area), Hawaii (part of ONCC), and Puerto Rico (part of SACC) are not included in this map.

Fig. 2

Example of PDF to TXT conversion by IMSR-Tool (green-border box). The four red-border boxes are screenshots taken from an example IMSR PDF to illustrate the four data categories to be pulled out. Their corresponding texts converted into the TXT file are highlighted in the four text blocks with blue borders, which will be used for further data processing and extraction based on keywords and text patterns recognition.

Fig. 3

Four data categories (tables) and their corresponding data elements (fields) extracted by IMSR-Tool. Field names were obtained from the raw IMSR PDFs and slightly modified to be concise and self-explained.

Fig. 4

A screenshot of the IMSR-Tool’s graphical user interface that enables user to explore and export data extraction results.

Fig. 5

Daily national preparedness level, number of large fires, and number of personnel assigned, looking specifically at two US regions (Northern California and Northwest) and the four largest-size fires (Dixie, Bootleg, Monument, and Caldor) occurring within these regions in 2021.

Fig. 6

Connecting unique fires in IMSR and in SIT-209 based on matching unformatted fire names. The total number of unique IMSR fires for each year is shown above each column.

Fig. 7

Comparison of results from connecting unique fires in IMSR and in SIT-209 by matching unformatted fire names or by matching formatted fire names.

Fig. 8

Matching daily fires between IMSR and SIT-209 based on eight different fire attributes.

Fig. 9

Number of connected and unconnected IMSR fire records when joining to SIT-209. Four fields (TOTAL_PERSONNEL, TOTAL_CREW, TOTAL_ENGINE, TOTAL_HELI) were not used for joining the 2019 data because of unavailable information in the 2019 SIT-209 data.