How we prepare an EIA: a real report, page by page30 pages of an environmental impact study built on the platform, with a voice that walks you through them.Browse the reportEvery vegetation fire seen by NASA's MODIS satellites, from November 2000 to 15 October 2026: 110 million detections, month by month.
In 2016-2025 the Aqua satellite detected on average 12% fewer vegetation fires a year than in 2003-2012. The decline is concentrated in savannas and farmland: West Africa -25%, South America -23%, Southeast Asia -34%, Central Asia -52%. It is the decline the literature describes and links mainly to the expansion and intensification of agriculture (Andela et al., Science 2017).
Open on the map →Canada goes the other way: +132% detections a year against 2003-2012. Its three worst seasons in 26 years are the last three, 2023, 2025 and 2024, and 2023 alone equals 4.5 average years. The sign was there before: in 2016-2021 Canada was already at +27%.
Open on the map →Fire radiative power measures how much energy a fire radiates when the satellite passes. North of 50°N the average power of a detection rose from 53 MW in 2003-2012 to 72 MW in 2016-2021 (+36%) and 84 MW in 2016-2025; in the tropics it fell from 46 to 42 MW. Southern Europe follows the north: Spain and Greece have a quarter to a third fewer detections, but each radiates 50-70% more power on average. It is the signal described by Cunningham, Williamson and Bowman (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2024): the most extreme wildfires are becoming more frequent and more intense.
Open on the map →52% of all detections since 2000 are African. The first country in the world is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (9.9%), then Brazil (9.1%) and Angola (7.3%). They are mostly savanna and cropland fires, lit every dry season, in two belts: north of the equator 83% fall between November and February, south of it 81% between June and September.
Open on the map →August is on average the month with the most fires on Earth. The two record months of the archive are August 2010 (770,000 detections) and August 2024 (748,000), both led by Brazil, Congo and Angola.
Open on the map →In 2015, an El Niño year, Indonesia recorded 162,000 detections; in 2016-2025 the average was 62% below 2003-2012. 2026 breaks the series: as of 15 October detections are already 118,500, the third year of the archive after 2015 and 2006, again in a strong El Niño year.
Open on the map →In Italy detections fell 27% against 2003-2012, but extreme summers remain: 2017, with 8,200 detections, came close to the 2007 record (8,800). July and August alone hold half of the year's fires, with a second, smaller peak in March.
Open on the map →Each hexagon sums the active fire detections of the MODIS instruments on NASA's Terra (from November 2000) and Aqua (from July 2002) satellites. A detection is a 1 km pixel that was burning when the satellite passed: it measures fire activity, not the number of fires and not the hectares burned. One large fire produces many detections; small, short fires or fires under clouds can be missed.
MODIS Collection 6.1 standard processing, November 2000 to December 2025 from the NASA FIRMS yearly country archives; January-July 2026 from the same processing and August to 15 October 2026 from the near-real-time feed, through the FIRMS API. Only vegetation fires are kept: volcanoes, gas flares, other industrial heat sources and offshore detections are removed (3.4% of the archive). The 2026 months come without a country, so each detection takes the country that dominates its cell in the archive.
Detections are aggregated on the H3 hexagonal grid (about 12,400 km² per cell at world scale, 1,770 and 250 km² as you zoom in) and shown as detections per 1,000 km² per year over the selected period, so colours stay comparable across zoom levels and period lengths.
Mean yearly detections in 2016-2025 against 2003-2012, from Aqua only. Terra's orbit has been drifting since 2021 and it now crosses the equator ever earlier, before the daily fire peak: its detections fell 34% between 2021 and 2025 for that reason alone, and reading that as a decline in fires would be a mistake. Aqua drifts too, towards the late afternoon: for intensity we also report the 2016-2021 window, before the drift. Cells with too few fires in both periods are left blank.
Terra and Aqua are in their decommissioning phase. This map is the full MODIS record; later months will come from the VIIRS instruments that succeed it.
Frequently asked questions
NASA's MODIS satellites detect between 3.5 and 5 million vegetation fires a year (Terra and Aqua together, 2003-2025). A detection is a 1 km pixel burning when the satellite passes: it measures fire activity, not the number of fires.
Overall, no: in 2016-2025 yearly detections were 12% lower than in 2003-2012 (Aqua satellite). But they grow in some regions, such as Canada (+132%), and north of 50°N fires are more intense: the average power of a detection rose 36% already in 2016-2021.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, with 9.9% of all detections since 2000, followed by Brazil (9.1%) and Angola (7.3%). Africa as a whole accounts for 52%.
About 4,600 detections a year on average from 2001 to 2025, with records in 2007 (8,800) and 2017 (8,200). July and August hold half of them.
From NASA FIRMS: MODIS Collection 6.1 active fire detections of the Terra and Aqua satellites, from November 2000 to 15 October 2026, filtered to vegetation fires and aggregated by XNatura on H3 hexagonal cells.
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