Abstract
Abstract. Over the past 2 decades, several global burned area products have been produced and released to the public. However, the accuracy assessment of such products largely depends on the availability of reliable reference data that currently do not exist on a global scale or whose production require a high level of dedication of project resources. The important lack of reference data for the validation of burned area products is addressed in this paper. We provide the Burned Area Reference Database (BARD), the first publicly available database created by compiling existing reference BA (burned area) datasets from different international projects. BARD contains a total of 2661 reference files derived from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery. All those files have been checked for internal quality and are freely provided by the authors. To ensure database consistency, all files were transformed to a common format and were properly documented by following metadata standards. The goal of generating this database was to give BA algorithm developers and product testers reference information that would help them to develop or validate new BA products. BARD is freely available at https://doi.org/10.21950/BBQQU7 (Franquesa et al., 2020).
Highlights
Validation is defined by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites Working Group on Calibration and Validation (CEOS-WGCV) as “the process of assessing, by independent means, the quality of the data products derived from the system outputs” (CEOS-WGCV, 2012)
We provide the Burned Area Reference Database (BARD), the first publicly available database created by compiling existing reference burned area (BA) datasets from different international projects
Reference datasets included in this database have been produced throughout the life of the FireCCI project, since 2010, and other initiatives such as the Landsat Level-3 Science Products and National Observatory of Forest Fires (NOFFi) projects have joined and contributed to this effort
Summary
Validation is defined by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites Working Group on Calibration and Validation (CEOS-WGCV) as “the process of assessing, by independent means, the quality of the data products derived from the system outputs” (CEOS-WGCV, 2012). Validation helps in evaluating the utility and limitations of using any remote sensing (RS) product, whether user accuracy requirements are met. Other variables are more difficult to validate, as they require generating global reference data that are based on higher-resolution sensors than those used to obtain the global product. This is the case of land cover or burned area products, which require first designing a sample strategy using statistically valid protocols and extracting from the selected sites the reference polygons to be compared with the global datasets. Despite the time and effort required to derive reference datasets, accuracy assessment is a critical part of any global RS project, and making these reference datasets publicly available will facilitate product comparison and lower the burden of validating future products
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call