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Fire Research » Fire & Climate Change
 Canadian
Large Fire Database (LFDB)
Annual Area Burned in Canada from 1950 to 1995
In Canada, only 3% of fires reach a final size greater than 200 hectares,
but these fires represent 97% of the total area burned. These extremely
skewed and opposite distributions of fire occurrence and area burned make
it possible to study the vast majority of area burned with only a relatively
small number of fires in the data set. The Canadian Large Fire Database
(LFDB) represents a compilation of all fires greater than 200 ha that
have occurred in Canada since the 1950s.
The development of the LFDB has been ongoing since the late 1980s and
has involved considerable effort on the part of the Canadian Forest Service
and each of the provincial and territorial fire management agencies. The
data set has been constructed from provincial and territorial fire reports
and includes digitized and georeferenced maps of final fire perimeters.
The original goal was to build a database from 1980 to the present, as
record-keeping and large fire perimeter mapping have been quite complete
throughout Canada from 1980. Recently, with the assistance of funds from
the Canadian Climate Change Action Fund, the LFDB has been extended backward
in time to include the full archive from each of the provinces and territories.
As a result, the database as currently assembled is as complete as possible
and covers the full range of record-keeping by the provincial and territorial
fire management agencies.
Download the Large Fire Database
Analysis of Large Fires (>200 ha) for All of Canada
Analysis of Large Fires (>200 ha) by Ecozones and Ecoregions
The LFDB has also been used to provide estimates of area burned in each
of Canada's forested ecozones and ecoregions. The ecozones of Canada are
15 broad ecological classifications accounting for all of Canada's land
area. The Large Fire Database has been used to calculate the amount of
area burned within each of these ecozones as a yearly average.
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