Abstract
Context and Background. Active fires have the potential to provide early estimates of fire perimeters, but there is a lack of information about the best active fire aggregation distances and how they can vary between fuel types, particularly in large areas of study under diverse climatic conditions. Objectives. The current study aimed at analyzing the effect of aggregation distances for mapping fire perimeters from active fires for contrasting fuel types and regions in Mexico. Materials and Methods. Detections of MODIS and VIIRS active fires from the period 2012–2018 were used to obtain perimeters of aggregated active fires (AGAF) at four aggregation distances (750, 1000, 1125, and 1500 m). AGAF perimeters were compared against MODIS MCD64A1 burned area for a total of 24 fuel types and regions covering all the forest area of Mexico. Results/findings. Optimum aggregation distances varied between fuel types and regions, with the longest aggregation distances observed for the most arid regions and fuel types dominated by shrubs and grasslands. Lowest aggregation distances were obtained in the regions and fuel types with the densest forest canopy and more humid climate. Purpose/Novelty. To our best knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the effect of fuel type on the optimum aggregation distance for mapping fire perimeters directly from aggregated active fires. The methodology presented here can be used operationally in Mexico and elsewhere, by accounting for fuel-specific aggregation distances, for improving rapid estimates of fire perimeters. These early fire perimeters could be potentially available in near-real time (at every satellite pass with a 12 h latency) in operational fire monitoring GIS systems to support rapid assessment of fire progression and fire suppression planning.
Highlights
An accurate monitoring of burned area dynamics is key to support fire prevention, fire suppression, and post-fire environmental impact evaluation, including carbon cycle dynamics and emissions quantification [1,2,3]
The goal of the current study was to analyze the influence of variations in the best aggregation distance for predicting burned area from the aggregation of MODIS and VIIRS active fires, for the main fuel types and ecoregions in Mexico, from 2012 to 2018
The global scale analyses of Giglio et al [8,10] and Randerson et al [11] developed differentiated models to relate number of active fires to total sum of burned area for 14 continental regions at gridded scales of 0.25–0.5◦. While this approach is valuable for developing global scale estimates of burned area and emissions [3,12], national level analyses can benefit from finer regionalization and spatial resolutions
Summary
An accurate monitoring of burned area dynamics is key to support fire prevention, fire suppression, and post-fire environmental impact evaluation, including carbon cycle dynamics and emissions quantification [1,2,3]. Some studies, mainly at coarse scales of analysis, have aimed at relating gridded counts of active fires with burned area to improve global estimates of total burned area [8,10,11]. Such studies have mostly aimed at characterizing global trends of burned area and fire emissions [3,12] as opposed to an individual fire perimeter delineation at finer spatial scales
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