Summary:

Kruger National Park (KNP) was established in 1898 to protect wildlife on nearly 2 million hectares of the South African Lowveld. The climate in this region of South Africa is subtropical, with hot summers and warm, dry winters. Summer rains fall between October and March.

Savanna fires are common in the South African Lowveld during the dry season. The two primary sources of fire ignition, historically and currently, are human activity and lightning.

This data set contains a record of all fires observed in the Kruger National Park for each of the 10 fire years from 1992 to 2001. The data were compiled from various sources, including old fire records in hardcopy and vector form, as well as satellite imagery. The data product consists of a polygon map (GIS shapefile format) of Kruger National Park and a cross-referenced database of fire information associated with all mapped units. The fire information includes the date and time when the fire started (if known); the cause of the fire; the person, group or phenomenon (e.g. lightning) that started the fire; the purpose for which the fire was lit (if relevant); an estimate of the fire intensity aggregated over the whole fire; the extent of the area burnt in hectares; and the perimeter of the area burnt in kilometers. The database file can be viewed with a text editor and can also be imported into common spreadsheet applications.

Data Citation:

Cite this data set as follows:

Woods, D., and N. Govender. 2004. SAFARI 2000 Historical Fire Maps, Kruger National Park, 1992-2001. Data set. Available on-line [http://daac.ornl.gov/] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. doi:10.3334/ORNLDAAC/756.

References:

Data Format:

The data files consist of the shape and associated files for the KNP. The shapefile format is the current working and interchange GIS format for simple vector data with attributes. The file format actually consists of three primary files.

XXX.shp - main file containing the actual polygon vertices.
XXX.shx - contains index data pointing to the structures in the .shp file.
XXX.dbf - contains the attributes in xBase (dBase) format.

The .shp is the main shape file of polygons, and the .prj and .dbf files are the projection and database files, respectively, and can be viewed with a text editor. The .shx, .sbn, and .sbx are index files. The polygon attributes are stored in a dBase file, knp_fires_1992-2001.dbf (also known as the polygon attribute table), that can also be imported into common spreadsheet applications.

The files contained within this data set are listed below:

knp_fires_1992-2001.dbf
knp_fires_1992-2001.prj
knp_fires_1992-2001.sbn
knp_fires_1992-2001.sbx
knp_fires_1992-2001.shp
knp_fires_1992-2001.shx

Additional information about the data format, data sources, and product description is found in the companion file: http://daac.ornl.gov/daacdata/safari2k/regional/knp_fire_maps/comp/knp_fire_maps_readme.pdf.

Document Information:

2004/8/2

Document Review Date:

2004/8/2

Document Curator:

webmaster@www.daac.ornl.gov

Document URL: