IberFire -- a detailed creation of a spatio-temporal dataset for wildfire risk assessment in Spain

Abstract

Wildfires pose a threat to ecosystems, economies and public safety, particularly in Mediterranean regions such as Spain. Accurate predictive models require high-resolution spatio-temporal data to capture complex dynamics of environmental and human factors. To address the scarcity of fine-grained wildfire datasets in Spain, we introduce IberFire: a spatio-temporal dataset with 1 km x 1 km x 1-day resolution, covering mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands from December 2007 to December 2024. IberFire integrates 120 features across eight categories: auxiliary data, fire history, geography, topography, meteorology, vegetation indices, human activity and land cover. All features and processing rely on open-access data and tools, with a publicly available codebase ensuring transparency and applicability. IberFire offers enhanced spatial granularity and feature diversity compared to existing European datasets, and provides a reproducible framework. It supports advanced wildfire risk modelling via Machine Learning and Deep Learning, facilitates climate trend analysis, and informs fire prevention and land management strategies. The dataset is freely available on Zenodo to promote open research and collaboration.