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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-401</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>COMBUST: Gridded combustible mass estimates of the built environment in the conterminous United States (1975&amp;ndash;2020)</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Uhl</surname>
<given-names>Johannes H.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4861-5915</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cook</surname>
<given-names>Maxwell C.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Amaral</surname>
<given-names>Cibele</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Leyk</surname>
<given-names>Stefan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9180-4853</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Balch</surname>
<given-names>Jennifer K.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Robock</surname>
<given-names>Alan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6319-5656</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Toon</surname>
<given-names>Owen B.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>University of Colorado Boulder, Institute of Behavioral Science, 483 UCB, Boulder, CO-80309, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>University of Colorado Boulder, Earth Lab, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), 216 UCB, Boulder, CO-80309, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Via E. Fermi 2749, 21027 Ispra, Italy</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Geography, 260 UCB, Boulder, CO-80309, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>University of Colorado Boulder, Environmental Data Science Innovation &amp; Inclusion Lab (ESIIL), 216 UCB, Boulder, CO-80309, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University, 14 College Farm Rd, New Brunswick, NJ-08901, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, 311 UCB, Boulder, CO-80309, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>24</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>29</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Johannes H. Uhl et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-401/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-401/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-401/essd-2026-401.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-401/essd-2026-401.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The increasing occurrence of natural hazards such as wildfires and drought, along with urban expansion and land consumption, causes increasing levels of fire risk to populations and human settlements. Moreover, increasing geopolitical instability in many regions of the world requires evaluation of scenarios related to potential hazards caused by military operations. Quantitative knowledge of burnable fuels and their spatiotemporal distribution across landscapes is crucial for risk and potential damage assessments. While there is a good understanding of the distributions of biomass fuels based on remote sensing observations, the combustible mass of the built environment has rarely been quantified in a spatially explicit and detailed manner. Therefore, we developed fine-grained estimates of urban fuels for the conterminous United States, estimating the combustible mass of building materials, building contents, and personal vehicles at 250 m spatial resolution. The resulting dataset is called COMBUST (COmbustible Mass of the Built environment in the conterminous United STates) and is currently the most comprehensive dataset of combustible mass and materials for the U.S., covering over 110 million structures. COMBUST includes different backcasting scenarios from 1975 to 2020 and is based on the integration of a variety of geospatial data sources such as Earth-observation derived data, real estate data, statistical estimates and volunteered geographic information. COMBUST is accompanied by COMBUST Plus, a set of consistently enumerated gridded datasets facilitating combustion exposure modelling of buildings and population. These datasets constitute a rich resource for ecological and social science applications, as well as for disaster risk management, planning and decision making. COMBUST is available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15611963&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15611963&lt;/a&gt;.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="29"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>Open Philanthropy Project</funding-source>
<award-id>Environmental and Human Impacts of Nuclear War</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>National Science Foundation</funding-source>
<award-id>2121976</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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