TheWildland Almanac

The Wildland Almanac

An open, up-to-date set of 30 m rasters for managed and unmanaged forests, shrublands, and grasslands - 41+ years of annual vegetation, carbon, water, fuels, fire hazard, and disturbance. It maps both near-current (2025) conditions and change over time (1985–2025). California is released as annual layers (1985–2025); the contiguous U.S. is now released as decadal snapshots (1990–2024).

CA + CONUS released 30 m 41 years 21 properties CC BY updated annually

Every property is expressed in physical units already in common use across the management and research communities, and all of them are calculated from the ground floor up by a single pipeline — which is what makes them consistent with one another, and over four decades. Each release reprocesses the whole record rather than appending new years; v2027, covering 1985 through water year 2026, is expected in November 2026.

Because vegetation, water, carbon, fuels and disturbance are all derived on one grid by one pipeline, questions that span themes — for example, how evapotranspiration responds to canopy loss after a fire — can be asked directly, without having to first find, assemble and reconcile disparate datasets.

Produced by university scientists and shared freely under CC BY.

How good is it? Each layer is checked against independent reference data - field plots, flux towers, stream gauges, aerial survey - and the comparisons are published in full, layer by layer, including where the Almanac is weaker than the alternatives. Some layers are better constrained than others, and the differences matter for what you can ask of them.

Look at the data → See how it checks out → Bring it into your tools → Get the data ↗

What it covers

The Almanac maps the vegetated, non-irrigated land surface of California — and the contiguous U.S. — from the backcountry to the wildland–urban interface: managed and unmanaged forests, shrublands and grasslands, including plantations and stands recently thinned, cut, or burned. The data are produced wall‑to‑wall and then masked to exclude areas such as open water, urbanized land, and intensively managed cropland.

Twenty-one properties, six themes

Each property and year is a separate 30 m Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, which are expressed in physical units and parallel metrics that are already in common use.

ThemeLayersCoverage
Vegetation cover & structure 5 layers Fractional cover - tree, shrub, herbaceous, and bare - plus areal-mean canopy height.
Hydrology 6 layers Evapotranspiration and runoff, each under both observed and fixed precipitation, plus soil moisture in absolute and fractional form.
Fire hazard & behavior 4 layers Landscape fuels (a FARSITE/FlamMap landscape, delivered as single-band layers), plus ELMFIRE-modeled flame length, rate of spread, and relative burn probability.
Carbon sequestration 2 layers Aboveground live biomass and gross primary production - relevant to nature-based climate solutions.
Forest dieoff risk 2 layers Tree-canopy drought exposure, both as it actually occurred and under a fixed severe drought (48-month SPI = −2).
Disturbance severity 2 layers Observed pixel-level annual loss of tree cover and aboveground biomass.

See full layer details, units, and caveats →

cog-viewer  ·  Fire_ELMFire_FL  ·  2025
Modelled flame length across California for water year 2025, 30 m resolution. The Sierra Nevada crest and the Coast Ranges read bright; the Central Valley is masked out.
0 m4 m+

See it before you download it

Flame length, water year 2025. What would burn if a fire arrived under typical local weather — brightest along the Sierra crest and through the Coast Ranges, with farmland and urban ground dropping out where the wildland mask excludes them.

Every one of the 21 properties opens the same way: pick a layer and a year and it streams straight into your browser from cloud storage, with the colour range and no-data value already set. Nothing to install, nothing to download, no account.

2025
Open 2025 in the viewer ↗ Every layer, every year →

The image above is a fixed 2025 preview. Move the slider and the button opens that year live, at full 30 m resolution.

Where to go next

01 · Dive in

Every Layer, Every Year

The whole record, openable: 21 properties across 41 water years, 28 individual layers including all eight bands of the fire landscape. One year slider drives the lot, with colour range and no-data already set on every link.

Open any layer → 02 · What's in it

The Data

The twenty-one properties, the six theme groups, spatial and temporal coverage, the California and CONUS tiers, license, and how to cite it.

Browse the data → 03 · How good is it

Benchmarking

What the layers were tested against, on three axes, with strengths and weaknesses at equal detail — including where the Almanac loses to the alternatives, and which comparisons are circular.

See the results → 04 · How to use it

Bring It Into Your Tools

Why the emerging cloud-native geospatial ecosystem can accelerate your work - plus step-by-step guides for streaming the data into ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, and Python. Start here if you want to get to work.

See the how-to guides →