whatcom.land · Whatcom County, Washington

About whatcom.land

whatcom.land is a website about land in Whatcom County, Washington. It maps public records on timber harvests, wildfire, protected land, floods and snow, and explains them in plain language. Skagit County is included for comparison. The site is made by Jim Colliander, a county resident.

Privacy and quiet places · Colors · Sources · Derived figures · Reading notes · This land · What's new

Status

whatcom.land is an independent project. It is not affiliated with any agency, and its maps are not official. Permits, flood zones for a property and forecasts should be checked with the agency concerned; each page links to it.

Privacy and quiet places

The site follows a set of privacy rules. Organizations are named; private individuals are not, including the small forest landowners named in the state's harvest records. Phone numbers, email addresses and street addresses in the source records are not downloaded. Each map has a maximum zoom, so that it shows patterns across valleys and towns rather than individual homes or remote places. The data pipeline stops before publishing if a private name, or a small fire's location more precise than a 1 km square, would appear. Map images, such as burn severity, are made no finer than the map's zoom limit (pixels of about 50 m on Fires).

Page	Closest zoom	Never shown
Harvests	Neighborhood	Names of small forest landowners
Fires	Valley	Where a small fire started: small fires are counted in 1 km squares, with causes only where a square had 3 or more fires, and no names or dates
Conserved	Valley	Trails, access points, names of small parcels
Floods	Neighborhood	Parcels, addresses, buildings, flood-insurance claims; FEMA's draft maps until they take effect
Snow	Valley; one glacier's close-up to neighborhood scale	Routes and access information

Visitors

A location found with "Use my location" stays in the visitor's browser and is not sent or stored. Visits are counted by Cloudflare's cookie-free analytics; visits that arrive from a flyer's QR code are tallied per flyer and day. The sign-up form stores the email address and message submitted.

Colors

Each subject has its own color family on every page. Darker shades mean more recent, or more.

Sources

A complete list of the data, maps, publications and images used on the site, by page. Data are downloaded by the site's pipeline from the services below; harvest data are updated weekly and the other pages yearly.

Harvests

Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Forest Practices Applications: active harvest units, harvest areas approved since 2011, and the landowner, timber owner and operator on each application. Map service; each application's record via FPA public search.
Washington law on forest practices, cited in the text: RCW 76.09.450, WAC 222-16-010, WAC 222-34-010.
Linked for official notices: DNR fpOnline and the Forest Practices search tool.

Fires

Short, K.C. 2026. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992–2024 [FPA_FOD_20260615], 7th edition. USDA Forest Service Research Data Archive. doi:10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.7.
USGS and USDA Forest Service, Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Areas Boundaries v12.0 (April 2025). mtbs.gov.
USGS and USDA Forest Service, MTBS Thematic Burn Severity Mosaics (annual, 30 m), for "How badly it burned": cloud-optimized copies on Source Cooperative (cboettig/fire); 2004 from MTBS ver. 9.0 on USGS ScienceBase (doi:10.5066/P9NETC0T).
Linked for current fires: WA DNR current incident information, InciWeb (Washington), and the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map.
The fire records and perimeters above are read from the copies published on Source Cooperative (cboettig/fire).

Conserved

U.S. Geological Survey, Gap Analysis Project, Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 4.1. Overview; feature service.
Whatcom Land Trust, Whatcom Land Trust Properties, public map layer (last updated September 2023), for the Land Trust's record over time (Whatcom only). Feature service.
U.S. Census Bureau, TIGERweb: county land area. TIGERweb.
Referenced: Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, State of Our Watersheds.

Floods

U.S. Geological Survey, Water Data APIs: annual peak streamflow and gage height (peaks) and gauge locations (monitoring-locations).
NOAA National Weather Service, National Water Prediction Service: flood categories for each gauge. water.noaa.gov.
FEMA, OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries v2. API. This product uses FEMA's OpenFEMA API, but is not endorsed by FEMA.
FEMA, National Flood Hazard Layer (effective maps). NFHL; for a property, FEMA's Flood Map Service Center.
Anderson, S.W., Konrad, C.P., Grossman, E.E., and Curran, C.A., 2019, Sediment storage and transport in the Nooksack River basin, northwestern Washington, 2006–15: USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5008. pubs.usgs.gov.
USDA NRCS SNOTEL daily snow and precipitation, November 10–16, 2021 (see Snow).
whatcom.land's estimate of the November 2021 flood, from Sentinel-1 radar: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), radiometric terrain correction by Catalyst, via the Microsoft Planetary Computer (CC BY 4.0); Height Above Nearest Drainage from ASF GLO-30 HAND, made from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (© DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA); permanent water from the JRC Global Surface Water occurrence layer (Pekel et al. 2016; file).
European Space Agency, "Flooding in Washington state" (Sentinel-1 radar, November 4 and 16, 2021); contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA. esa.int.

Snow

USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, National Water and Climate Center: SNOTEL and snow-course measurements with 1991–2020 medians, from the Air-Water Database. wcc.sc.egov.usda.gov.
GLIMS Glacier Database, National Snow and Ice Data Center (doi:10.7265/N5V98602), with outlines by Portland State University: Fountain, Glenn and Basagic 2023 (doi:10.15760/geology-data.04) and Fountain and Glenn 2022 (doi:10.15760/geology-data.03), CC0.
Columbia Climate School, "Glaciers can mean the difference between life and death for salmon during heatwaves" (2022). news.climate.columbia.edu.
City of Bellingham, Middle Fork Nooksack diversion. cob.org.
Washington Department of Ecology, Nooksack (WRIA 1) water-rights adjudication. ecology.wa.gov.
Mt. Baker Ski Area, snowfall statistics. mtbaker.us.

All pages

County boundaries: U.S. Census Bureau, TIGERweb.
Base map: OpenFreeMap "Positron" style, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
Topographic and satellite base maps: USGS, The National Map (orthoimagery from the USDA National Agriculture Imagery Program at close zoom, Landsat at wider views). basemap.nationalmap.gov.
Terrain for the 3D glacier close-up: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen), here from United States 3DEP elevation data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, and across the border data licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
Map software: MapLibre GL JS (BSD license).

Derived figures

Most figures are taken directly from agency records. The following are calculated by whatcom.land from public data:

Fires: counts of small fires in each 1 km square, from the national fire-occurrence records.
Fires: acres and shares of each large fire by burn severity, counted from MTBS's 30 m severity maps inside the fire's perimeter in the county.
Snow: the county's April 1 index, the total snow at the automated stations divided by the total of their normals.
Floods: the height reached by the same river flow in earlier and recent decades.
Floods: the extent of open floodwater on 16 November 2021, from Sentinel-1 radar, labelled Our estimate.
Conserved: shares of the county, with each acre counted once at its strongest level of protection.

Maps derived from satellite data are labelled Our estimate. The first is the November 2021 Nooksack flood from Sentinel-1 radar. It shows open water only, misses water in towns and under trees, and is not an official flood map.

Reading notes

Each page has notes on how to read it: Harvests · Fires · Conserved · Floods · Snow.

This land

Tribal lands, including the Lummi Reservation and Nooksack trust land, are not counted in the Conserved figures. Tribal place names and knowledge are not included without the Nations' permission.

What's new

Oct 2026Corrections from an expert review on every page (snow readings outside the April window, flood labels, fire size classes, harvest wording, protected-land shares); clearer flood tables and the November 2021 flood; Fires becomes its own tab; this page.
Oct 2026Floods and Snow pages; Fires added under Forests.
Oct 2026Harvest data refreshes automatically every week.
Sep 2026Conserved page; Skagit County added for comparison.
Sep 2026First version: timber harvests in Whatcom County, in plain language.

Contact

Corrections, suggestions and requests for updates can be sent through the sign-up form.