Wildfire is a defining ecological, health, and socio-economic process in the Mediterranean Basin. Paradoxically, information on its long-term history has remained limited across national archives, published and unpublished records. Here, we present the Mediterranean Fire History Database (MedFireAtlas), the first compiled, open-access collection of tree-ring-based fire history reconstructions and governmental documentary records spanning several centuries of wildfires. The MedFireAtlas currently contains 25 site-level tree-ring-based fire history reconstructions and > 2 million documentary records from the southern European and northern African sides of the Mediterranean Basin, standardised with common metadata. All records are openly accessible through an interactive web platform that enables users to download and explore the spatial and temporal fire patterns. As of this release, MedFireAtlas aggregated millions of georeferenced records spanning centuries, to our knowledge, representing the most extensive open archive of Mediterranean fire history. By providing harmonised wildfire data across spatial and temporal scales, the database establishes a critical foundation for ecological research, model benchmarking, and policy-relevant applications in one of the world’s top pyrogeographic hotspots.
The MedFireAtlas is designed as a living community resource, supported by an accompanying web platform (
medfireatlas.shinyapps.io) that provides interactive visualisation, data filtering and downloading options.