Use the slider to change which fires are displayed on the map. You can view them by year or all at once. Clicking on a fire outline will display more information about the incident. Use the mousewheel or map zoom buttons to change the zoom level.
This data was provided by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and can be accessed here. NIFC gathers fire data from agencies across the country. As such, there are inconsistencies in the data due to the differences in reporting procedures among agencies. In particular, this data is meant to represent large wildfires and as such many smaller fires have not been included. However, the threshold for what defines a "large wildfire" differs between agencies, which is why there are fires as small as one acre represented on the map. This inconsistency also explains why 2011 appears to have much more fires than any other year, but in reality that is an error in the dataset caused by over-reporting. We have also removed all Alaskan wildfires from the dataset in order to focus on the continental US, which is another reason why our numbers may not match the official statistics for any given year. Due to such inaccuracies this data should not be used as a source for academic publications or scientific research. It exists as a broad visual for curiosity and educational purposes.