This dataset contains fire event maps for the years 2001-2016 for the coterminous U.S. We used the MODIS Burned Area product (MCD64A1) Collection 6 to extract individual fires from this product. Each pixel of the MCD64A1 raster product, delivered on a monthly timestep (accessible from fuoco.geog.umd.edu), gives the fire burn date in Julian calendar without designation of individual fire events. In order to extract individual fire events, we compared each pixel of MCD64A1 with neighboring pixels. If pixels are within a 5-pixel distance and 9-day time span, we lumped these burned pixels together to create an individual fire event. We determined that, at least for the western U.S. (paper and explicit methodology forthcoming), a distance of five pixels and nine days constituted the best spatial and temporal thresholds to define individual fire events based on comparison with the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity product (www.mtbs.gov). Through the definition of individual fire events we calculated additional metrics related to the fire regime, including ignition point, fire size, fire spread rate, and start and end dates of the fire. We expect that the five-pixel, nine-day criteria may vary by ecoregion or land use type that will be examined in future research. Our results demonstrate the value of using the MODIS Burned Area product to create a new fire event map that captures all fire events for the conterminous U.S. The annual maps are presented in tif format that can be downloaded separately or combined for all years together. Each map has an attribute table with following fields: VALUE: Unique ID for each designated fire event Count: Number of fire pixels within each fire event Area: The total area of the fire event in square meters MIN: The minimum fire burn date (in Julian date), or start date of fire MAX: The maximum fire burn date (in Julian date), or end date of fire RANGE: The range of fire burn dates, or length of fire in number of days AREA_hec: The total area of fire event in hectares FSR: The mean fire spread rate in hectares per day