This data set provides active fire locations and estimates of annual fire frequencies for South America from 2000-2007. Data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors aboard the Terra (2000-??2007) and Aqua (2003-2007) satellite platforms were analyzed to determine spatial and temporal patterns in satellite fire detections.

The analysis considered a high-confidence subset of all MODIS fire detections to reduce the influence of false fire detections over small forest clearings in Amazonia (Schroeder et al., 2008). The number of unique days on which the active fire detections were recorded within a 1 km radius was estimated from the subset of active fire detections and the ArcGIS neighborhood variety algorithm.

There are 14 data files with this data set: 7 GeoTIFF (.tif) files of fire frequency at MODIS 250 m resolution, where each grid cell value represents the number of days in that year on which active fires were detected, and 7 shape files of active fire locations for the years 2001-2007.