Changes to the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program mapping production procedures and data products

Danny Howard,Justin Epting,Joshua J Picotte,Krishna Bhattarai,Kurtis Nelson,Nate Benson,Brad Quayle,Jennifer Lecker

doi:10.1186/s42408-020-00076-y

Abstract

BackgroundThe Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program has been providing the fire science community with large fire perimeter and burn severity data for the past 14 years. As of October 2019, 22 969 fires have been mapped by the MTBS program and are available on the MTBS website (https://www.mtbs.gov). These data have been widely used by researchers to examine a variety of fire and climate science topics. However, MTBS has undergone significant changes to its fire mapping methodology, the remotely sensed imagery used to map fires, and the subsequent fire occurrence, burned boundary, and severity databases. To gather a better understanding of these changes and the potential impacts that they may have on the user community, we examined the changes to the MTBS burn mapping protocols and whether remapped burned area boundary and severity products differ significantly from the original MTBS products.ResultsAs MTBS data have been used over the course of many years and for many disparate applications, users should be aware that the MTBS burned area and severity products have been actively reviewed and revised to benefit from more robust satellite image availability and to address any observed quality issues. In a sample of 123 remapped fires, we found no significant change in the burned area boundary products when compared to the original mapped fires; however, significant changes did exist in the distribution of unburned, low, and moderate burn severity pixels within the thematic product.ConclusionsAnalysis of these remapped fires provides a look into how the MTBS fire mapping methods have evolved over time. In the future, additional changes to the MTBS data record may impact data users’ downstream applications. The MTBS program has an established continuous improvement approach to the MTBS methodology and products, and subsequently encourages users to confirm that they are using the most recent data.

Highlights

The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program was established in 2006, with a mission to remotely assess the location, extent, burned area boundaries, and burn severity of large fires using Landsat imagery on all lands across the conterminous United States (CONUS), and Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, USA, for the period from 1984 to present (Eidenshink et al 2007)
CBI assesses damage to vegetated and dead biomass using a continuous index with values ranging from 0.0 to 3.0, while dNBR has been used to assess the changes in reflection in vegetated and nonvegetated surfaces resulting from fire (Key and Benson 2006)
The dNBR metric is a measure of the difference between a pre- and post-fire Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) image, with typical values ranging between −2000 and 2000

Summary

Introduction

The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program was established in 2006, with a mission to remotely assess the location, extent, burned area boundaries, and burn severity (see Fig. 1 for an example) of large fires using Landsat imagery on all lands across the conterminous United States (CONUS), and Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, USA, for the period from 1984 to present (Eidenshink et al 2007). The MTBS program originally defined burn severity as visible alteration of vegetation, dead biomass, and soil that occurs within a fire perimeter (Eidenshink et al 2007) These changes can be assessed on the ground (e.g., via the Composite Burn Index, CBI) and subsequently related to remotely sensed (e.g., via the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio, dNBR) estimates of burn severity (Eidenshink et al 2007; see Fig. 1 for an example comparison between CBI and dNBR). To gather a better understanding of these changes and the potential impacts that they may have on the user community, we examined the changes to the MTBS burn mapping protocols and whether remapped burned area boundary and severity products differ significantly from the original MTBS products

Results

Discussion

Conclusion