A Geographically Validated Administrative Wildfire Inventory for Türkiye (2013–2025)

Abstract. Administrative wildfire records provide an essential foundation for understanding fire regimes, evaluating fire management practices, and supporting Earth system research. However, their scientific utility is often limited by typographical errors, inaccurate geographic coordinates, and inconsistencies between recorded administrative locations and GPS positions. This dataset presents a geographically validated administrative wildfire inventory for Türkiye spanning 2013–2025, derived from official records maintained by the General Directorate of Forestry (OGM). The original archive was processed using a reproducible five-stage geographic validation workflow designed to systematically identify, reconcile, and document spatial inconsistencies while preserving the integrity of the underlying fire records. The workflow combines administrative text harmonization, spatial verification against official district boundaries, satellite-assisted coordinate recovery using NASA VIIRS Active Fires / Thermal Anomalies detections, distance-based border assessment, and conservative on-land coordinate imputation for irrecoverable records. Rather than discarding records with erroneous coordinates, the methodology prioritizes recovery of validated fire locations and, where this is not possible, preserves the statistical record while explicitly preventing misleading spatial interpretations. To ensure complete transparency, every wildfire record includes a provenance flag indicating whether its coordinates are original (administratively validated), satellite-corrected, border-accepted, or conservatively imputed. The resulting inventory substantially improves the spatial consistency and analytical reliability of Türkiye’s historical wildfire archive while preserving its original event attributes. This openly available dataset serves as a valuable contribution to wildfire regime analysis, validation of remote sensing products and Earth system model outputs, and operational wildfire research throughout Türkiye and the eastern Mediterranean.