About BURNS

Author

Pierre Beaucoral

What this is

BURNS is a season tracker for European wildfires. It maps where it burned, how much, when, and what land cover burned, across Europe (EU27 + EFTA + UK + Western Balkans), refreshed weekly during the fire season (June–September). It grew out of a one-off analysis of the 2025 summer season, which remains the reference post for the methodology (soon archived under Seasons).

Data source

All fire outlines come from EFFIS (European Forest Fire Information System), part of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. EFFIS draws the outline of each burned area it can detect from satellite imagery, automatically, and typically only for fires of roughly 30 to 50 hectares and above.

Key caveats, roughly in order of how much they should shape your reading:

Rapid perimeters undercount small fires and are revised over time as mapping is updated.
They differ from official national statistics, which use different thresholds, definitions of burned area, and may include smaller fires. Numbers here are estimates from mapped fire outlines, not official totals.
Sensor transition: EFFIS mapping has been transitioning from MODIS-based to Sentinel-2-based detection, which affects comparability of fire counts and minimum detectable size across years. Fire counts roughly doubled from 2023 to 2024 because smaller fires became detectable, not because fire activity doubled, so cross-year comparisons on this site use burned area, which is dominated by large fires and much less sensitive to the detection threshold.
Current-season numbers will move. Because rapid mapping is revised (outlines get refined, added, and merged), every weekly refresh can change the current season’s figures. Each page therefore pins the exact snapshot date it was computed from in its figure captions; a later re-render is not expected to reproduce earlier figures exactly, by design.
Country attribution uses maximum spatial overlap with national borders (mainland-Europe crop, meaning overseas territories excluded), which can misallocate totals for fires in border areas. The EFFIS country attribute is kept as a cross-check only.
The archive starts in 2016. Earlier seasons do not exist in this EFFIS layer, so multi-year comparison bands use 2017 onward.
Seasonal framing and windows: the tracker uses the meteorological definition of the season, which may exclude late-season fires outside the June–September window. Season-comparison charts (like the cumulative-area chart) use the 1 June to 30 September window; season-page maps and country rankings cover everything mapped since 1 January. Figure captions state which window they use.

Disclaimer

These figures are intended for analytical and exploratory purposes only. They provide a comparative, transparent view of mapped fire polygons, not a replacement for national reporting. For policy, management, or operational decisions, refer to authoritative national and European reporting systems.

Author & code

Built by Pierre Beaucoral. Code and pipeline: Available Here.

--- title: "About BURNS" author: "Pierre Beaucoral" --- ## What this is **BURNS** is a season tracker for European wildfires. It maps *where* it burned, *how much*, *when*, and *what* land cover burned, across Europe (EU27 + EFTA + UK + Western Balkans), refreshed weekly during the fire season (June–September). It grew out of a one-off analysis of the 2025 summer season, which remains the reference post for the methodology (soon archived under *Seasons*). ## Data source All fire outlines come from **EFFIS** (European Forest Fire Information System), part of the **Copernicus Emergency Management Service**. EFFIS draws the outline of each burned area it can detect from satellite imagery, automatically, and typically only for fires of roughly **30 to 50 hectares and above**. Key caveats, roughly in order of how much they should shape your reading: - **Rapid perimeters undercount small fires** and are revised over time as mapping is updated. - **They differ from official national statistics**, which use different thresholds, definitions of burned area, and may include smaller fires. Numbers here are estimates from mapped fire outlines, not official totals. - **Sensor transition:** EFFIS mapping has been transitioning from MODIS-based to Sentinel-2-based detection, which affects comparability of fire counts and minimum detectable size across years. Fire *counts* roughly doubled from 2023 to 2024 because smaller fires became detectable, not because fire activity doubled, so cross-year comparisons on this site use burned *area*, which is dominated by large fires and much less sensitive to the detection threshold. - **Current-season numbers will move.** Because rapid mapping is revised (outlines get refined, added, and merged), every weekly refresh can change the current season's figures. Each page therefore pins the exact snapshot date it was computed from in its figure captions; a later re-render is not expected to reproduce earlier figures exactly, by design. - **Country attribution** uses maximum spatial overlap with national borders (mainland-Europe crop, meaning overseas territories excluded), which can misallocate totals for fires in border areas. The EFFIS country attribute is kept as a cross-check only. - **The archive starts in 2016.** Earlier seasons do not exist in this EFFIS layer, so multi-year comparison bands use 2017 onward. - **Seasonal framing and windows:** the tracker uses the meteorological definition of the season, which may exclude late-season fires outside the June–September window. Season-comparison charts (like the cumulative-area chart) use the 1 June to 30 September window; season-page maps and country rankings cover everything mapped since 1 January. Figure captions state which window they use. ## Disclaimer These figures are intended for **analytical and exploratory purposes** only. They provide a comparative, transparent view of mapped fire polygons, not a replacement for national reporting. For policy, management, or operational decisions, refer to authoritative national and European reporting systems. ## Author & code Built by **Pierre Beaucoral**. Code and pipeline: Available [Here](https://github.com/PierreBeaucoral/BURNS).