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Abstract The scale of wildfire impacts to the built environment is growing and will likely continue under rising average global temperatures. We investigate whether and at what destruction threshold wildfires have influenced human mobility patterns by examining the migration effects of the most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 1999 and 2020. We find that only the most extreme wildfires (258+ structures destroyed) influenced migration patterns. In contrast, the majority of wildfires examined were less destructive and did not cause significant changes to out- or in-migration. These findings suggest that, for the past two decades, the influence of wildfire on population mobility was rare and operated primarily through destruction of the built environment. 

As the number of highly destructive wildfires grows, it is increasingly important to understand the long-term changes that occur to fire-affected places. Integrating approaches from social and biophysical science, we document two forms of neighborhood change following the 2018 Camp Fire in the United States, examining the more than 17,000 residential structures within the burn footprint. We found that mobile or motor homes, lowervalue residences, and absentee owner residences had a significantly higher probability of being destroyed, providing evidence that housing stock filtering facilitated socially stratified patterns of physical damage. While the relationship between building value and destruction probability could be explained by measures of building density and distance to nearby roads, building type remained an independent predictor of structure loss that we could not fully explain by adding environmental covariates to our models. Using a geospatial machine learning technique, we then identified buildings that had been reconstructed within the burn footprint 20 months after the fire. We found that reconstructed buildings were more likely to have been owner-occupied prior to the fire and had higher average pre-fire property value, suggesting an emerging pattern of cost-burden gentrification. Our findings illustrate the importance of examining the built environment as a driver of socially uneven disaster impacts. Wildfire mitigation strategies are needed for mobile and motor home residents, renters, low-income residents, and dense neighborhoods. 

Abstract This paper describes a dataset mined from the public archive (1999–2020) of the US National Incident Management System Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) forms (a total of 187,160 reports for 35,170 incidents, including 34,478 wildland fires). This system captures detailed daily/regular information on incident development and response, including social and economic impacts. Most (98.4%) reports are wildland fire-related, with other incident types including hurricane, hazardous materials, flood, tornado, search and rescue, civil unrest, and winter storms. The archive, although publicly available, has been difficult to use for research due to multiple record formats, inconsistent data entry, and no clean pathway from individual reports to high-level incident analysis. Here, we describe the open-source, reproducible methods used to produce a science-grade version of the data, including formal connections made to other published wildland fire data products. Among other applications, this integrated and spatially augmented dataset enables exploration of the daily progression of the most costly, damaging, and deadly environmental-hazard events in recent US history.