Near real-time generation of a country-level burned area database for Italy from Sentinel-2 data and active fire detections

Abstract

The first national database of burned areas in Italy at 20 m spatial resolution is presented. It was generated in near real-time by processing, as soon as they were available, all the Sentinel-2 images covering the Italian territory throughout the fire seasons of years 2019–2021. An updated version of the AUTOmatic Burned Area Mapper (AUTOBAM), originally developed in a previous study, was used to produce the database. Active fire data and a feature extraction procedure were used by AUTOBAM to associate a set of quality flags to each burned area.The AUTOBAM product was evaluated by comparing it with reference polygons derived from ground surveys. Even the database derived from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) was compared to reference polygons to assess the utility of the AUTOBAM product with respect to an already existing one. Good results were obtained by AUTOBAM in terms of detection capability (the Correctness parameter) and overlap factor (both larger than 60%). However, quite high values of the commission error were obtained, especially in 2019. Through a per land cover analysis, it was found that this error mostly occurred in cultivated land. Excluding the latter target, the commission error was always less than 35%, the omission error was less than 27% and the Dice Coefficient was larger than 69%.