How to use . . . 

​​THE ANNUAL ILLINOIS PRESCRIBED FIRES ACCOMPLISHED MAP

​Maps are powerful. They help us quickly understand our landscapes. We have created a new map called the “Annual Illinois Prescribed Fires Accomplished.” The map will allow your agency to post polygons detailing the extent of your accomplished controlled fires on top of a layer detailing the of ownership of protected lands across the state.
 
If you open the map and zoom in and out to your favorite areas you can see specific fire units. Click the layer list and turn on the Protected Lands feature. The map is simple and intuitive.

How do you participate?
In order to participate you simply need to email [email protected]        
 with one of these:

• A shapefile  What is a shapefile?
• A kmz file, such as generated from Google Earth.

Please include the date on which the burn was conducted or, barring that, the season in which the parcel was burned. This information can either be integrated into the shapefile/KMZ file or provided as text; whichever is easiest for you. All of the polygons can be sent as a single shapefile/KMZ file. If that’s not feasible, you can also send individual shapefiles/KMZ files for each burn. That’s it; we’ll take everything else from there!

We are accepting July 1 through June 30 data for this year and past years back to the fire year of July 2015 through June 2016. We start our calendar year in July which allows the typical fall fires of one year to be grouped with the spring fires of the next year.

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Data Sharing Policy for the Illinois Prescribed Fire Accomplished Map
By Bill Kleiman

So far, we have received a few requests from researchers for the prescribed fire shapefiles. The shapefile includes all the polygons that summarize a year of fire data. We do not have rare species locations in our data, just shapes of accomplished fires.  A researcher could go to the map and simply hand-draw each polygon without us sharing our shapefiles. Sharing the shapefiles saves the researcher effort. We think it is generally a good idea to for researchers to use our fire data.

We plan to do the following to manage this data:

• We will ask each researcher to describe in writing who they are, who they are working for, and why they want the data.
  
• We will request results and/or publications resulting from the use of the data be provided to the Fire Council.

We generally do not share data on burns conducted on privately owned property that we have identified in our database.  For instance, some Nature Preserves are private property and we have tagged most of those tracts as private.  We have a way to filter out private lands and we plan to do that. 

We request that the data not be shared beyond their use. We hope this seems reasonable. Feel free to contact us with feedback.

​Illinois Prescribed Fire Accomplished Map Link

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​UPDATED 9/2023