European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS)
GWIS Country Profile: yearly burned area by land cover (MODIS MCD64A1)
Area burned each year from 2002, in hectares, for the world and for each continent (Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania), split by land cover: forest, savannas, shrublands and grasslands, croplands and other. Mapped from NASA's MODIS MCD64A1 Collection 6.1 monthly burned-area product at 500 metre resolution, which misses many small fires and much cropland burning, so totals are lower than finer-resolution estimates. Each response also carries monthly values and the 2002-2024 monthly range. Calendar years, unlike the March-February fire seasons of State of Wildfires.
Numbers published from it
Licence and credit
- What the terms say
“Unless otherwise indicated (e.g. in individual copyright notices), content owned by the EU on this website is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This means that reuse is allowed, provided appropriate credit is given and changes are indicated.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-04; re-checked automatically every week.
- Credit we give
- © European Union, Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), Country Profile, https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/country.profile, accessed {date_accessed}, CC BY 4.0. Burned area from NASA MODIS MCD64A1 v061 (Giglio et al. 2021, doi:10.5067/MODIS/MCD64A1.061).
- Copy of the raw file
- Allowed: we keep a public copy of every version we use.
- Cite as
- Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), Country Profile, European Commission Joint Research Centre, https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/country.profile, accessed {date_accessed}. Burned area from Giglio, L., Justice, C., Boschetti, L., & Roy, D. (2021). MODIS/Terra+Aqua Burned Area Monthly L3 Global 500m SIN Grid V061 [Dataset]. NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MCD64A1.061
Files
World. banfyear holds one row per year 2002-2025 with lc1..lc5 and lc_tot (hectares burned by land cover, MCD64A1) and ba_area_ha, ba_count, firesize (GlobFire; 0.0 in 2025, not processed). Also banfmonth, banfmonthlyavg, monthlyburnedareavshistorical and fire-size distributions.
https://cprof.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/v3/banf?level=AOI&value=WORLD&year=2025&yearFrom=2002&yearTo=2025&env=PRODAfrica (UN continent UN_AFR), same structure as banf-world.
https://cprof.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/v3/banf?level=AOI&value=UN_AFR&year=2025&yearFrom=2002&yearTo=2025&env=PRODAmericas (UN continent UN_AME), same structure as banf-world.
https://cprof.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/v3/banf?level=AOI&value=UN_AME&year=2025&yearFrom=2002&yearTo=2025&env=PRODAsia (UN continent UN_ASI), same structure as banf-world.
https://cprof.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/v3/banf?level=AOI&value=UN_ASI&year=2025&yearFrom=2002&yearTo=2025&env=PRODEurope (UN continent UN_EUR), same structure as banf-world. This is GWIS's MODIS-based Europe, not the EFFIS estimate (source effis), and the two differ.
https://cprof.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/v3/banf?level=AOI&value=UN_EUR&year=2025&yearFrom=2002&yearTo=2025&env=PRODOceania (UN continent UN_OCE), same structure as banf-world.
https://cprof.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/v3/banf?level=AOI&value=UN_OCE&year=2025&yearFrom=2002&yearTo=2025&env=PROD
Status
- Programme
- GWIS is run by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, with Copernicus, GEO and NASA as partners. Its burned area depends entirely on NASA's MODIS MCD64A1 product, hence the US federal exposure. The app's bulk downloads returned 404 when checked on 4 October 2026, and the year range in these URLs must be extended by hand each year.
- Updates
- Annual for completed years; on 4 October 2026 the app showed 2002-2024 while the API already held 2025 land-cover values
- Last check
- Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-05T11:03:17Z)