Wildfire environmental impacts and the threat they pose to human live and values depend of how fast it spreads, how much biomass is consumed, and how much energy it releases and at what rate. Nearly every feature of contemporary fire management relies upon the understanding and prediction of fire behavior characteristics and a number of tools have been developed for such purpose. However, no attempts have been made so far to provide an overall worldwide picture of fire behavior characteristics, patterns and drivers. These are the general objectives of the BONFIRE project, requiring compilation of the available fire behavior information from field experimental fires, wildfires, and prescribed fires in a global database and subsequent integrated analysis of variation in fire behavior characteristics. We describe the methodology used to build the database, examine data partition by country, climate, biome and fuel complex categories, and mention the difficulties inherent to the process.