Methodology

Data used in Spain in Flames, both in the fires map and the journalistic investigations, comes from the General Statistic of Forest Fires (EGIF, in Spanish), elaborated by the Coordination Centre of National Information about Forest Fires (CCINIF, in Spanish). The information is collected by each autonomous community in Spain from the fire record filled in situ in each fire. This record contains more than 150 text entries. When data from the autonomous communities arrives to CCINIF, it is processed and consolidated into the EGIF. The information is then sent to the European Commission. This long, complicated process make the data available only two years afterwards.

We used the Freedom of Information Act in 2012 to access to the data of fires forest from 2001 to 2010. Since then, we have asked for the EGIF each year. From 2024 onwards, the data are accessible from the website of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. Here you can download the data aggregated and raw data from the EGIF between 1968 and 2021, the last year with available information. In order to process and analyze the data, we converted the database from its original format MS Access to SQLite by using Cynergi’s conversion utility. We also converted the location coordinates from UTM to WGS 84 and the control and extinction times to minutes.

In the database analysis, a series of shortcomings were identified in the homogenization of the data:

• The cause of each forest fire was a supposed cause and not a certain cause in more than half of the cases.

• Until 1983, the exact location of the fires is not recorded. After that year, the geolocation of the fires is not specified in almost 54% of the fires. For these cases we use the location of the municipality of origin of the fire, if specified, to show them on the fire map. We have also detected other fires that were incorrectly geolocated, since their coordinates were outside the boundaries of their province, so we have relocated them to the coordinates of the municipality of origin.

• Economic losses information is limited, which make almost impossible the idea of analyzing the real cost of the fires in Spain. More than 19% of the fire records don’t include the costs of extinction and almost 34% don’t include economic losses.

Plus, official data could contain mistakes. Civio can’t corroborate all and each one of the data registers of each fire, so we have to work with the official information available. This is the reason why we decided to locate the fires with the coordinates given by the official records -except for the cases mentioned above- even if they locate fires in the Mediterranean Sea.

In order to offer a good performance in the map, only fires that burned 1 ha or more are displayed. These are 223.355 fires, a 37% of the total, but they represent almost 96% of the burned surface between 1983 and 2021. To display this data, we use the location of the fire as a center point and then we expand the circle area in proportion with the surface burned. This doesn’t mean that the fire propagated in a circular figure, but it has the informative purpose of showing a visual idea of the real extension of the burned surface.

Here is available to download the .csv file with all fires that burned 1 ha or more displayed on the map.