Mapping the 2026 Wildfire Season in ArcGIS Pro with Living Atlas Data

[Eric Pimpler]

On the afternoon of August 1, three fires broke out around Spokane, Washington. By Sunday morning the Washington State Emergency Operations Center estimated about 700 structures had been destroyed and more than 65,000 people were under evacuation orders. Spokane’s mayor called it the worst natural disaster the region has faced. The fires were still at zero containment two days in.

Spokane is the headline, but it is not an outlier. Oregon had burned more than 1.7 million acres by the end of July and is on pace to pass 2024, its worst season on record. The Big Grass Fire crossed from Oregon into Idaho and grew past 300,000 acres in about a week. Nationally, more than 6 million acres had burned by July 31, roughly 165 percent of the ten-year average, and the National Interagency Fire Center moved the country to Preparedness Level 5 on July 18.

If you work in GIS for a city, county, utility, or agency anywhere in the West, someone has probably already asked you for a map. The good news is that you do not need to hunt down shapefiles or wait on a data request. Nearly everything you need to build a solid situational awareness map is already sitting in ArcGIS Living Atlas, and it updates itself.

This article walks through the layers I’d pull together in ArcGIS Pro, why each one matters, and how to make them work together instead of just piling them on top of each other.

Read the entire article - https://geospatialtraining.com/mapping-the-2026-wildfire-season-in-arcgis-pro-with-living-atlas-data/