Abstract
The scientific community interested in atmospheric chemistry, gas emissions from vegetation fires, and carbon cycling is currently demanding information on the extent and timing of biomass burning at the global scale. In fact, the area and type of vegetation that is burned on a monthly or annual basis are two of the parameters that provide the greatest uncertainty in the calculation of gas and aerosol emissions and burned biomass. To address this need, an inventory of burned areas at monthly time periods for the year 2000 at a resolution of 1 km2has been produced using satellite data and has been made freely available to the scientific community. In this paper, estimates of burned area and number of burn scars for four broad vegetation classes and reported at the country level for the year 2000 are presented using data taken from the inventory. Over 3.5 million km2of burned areas were detected in the year 2000, of which approximately 80% occurred in areas described as woodlands and shrublands. Approximately 17% of the burned area occurred in grasslands and croplands, the remaining 3% occurred in forests. Almost 600,000 separate burn scars were detected. Descriptions of vegetation burning activity are given for ten regions. Finally, monthly burned area estimates are presented for the Central African Republic to illustrate the usefulness of these data for understanding, monitoring and managing vegetation burning activities.
Highlights
[1] The scientific community interested in atmospheric chemistry, gas emissions from vegetation fires, and carbon cycling is currently demanding information on the extent and timing of biomass burning at the global scale
The data set described in this paper consists of annual burned area estimates for the four vegetation classes outlined in the previous section differentiated by political boundary
An example of the use of the monthly burned area products is presented for the Central African Republic (CAR) and illustrates the usefulness of the data set for the monitoring of burning activity and assessing the impact of burning on the vegetation
Summary
[2] Biomass burning is an annually occurring phenomenon affecting almost every vegetated ecosystem on Earth. The full resolution data set is available to the scientific community to derive estimates of burned area per regional vegetation types. Burning of agricultural land is often not presented in national statistics that mainly focus on forested areas and the financial impact of fires in forests This data set indicates burning activity in all vegetated regions and the opportunity to assess the amount of residue burning and land clearance burning activities is available to the scientific community. Two algorithms were applied globally to derive burned area products with the same resolution as the GBA-2000 products These results make a valuable data set for comparison, and values are reported in this paper where this is possible D14S03 ecosystem specific regional algorithms have been developed by a network of partners and applied at the global scale at a resolution of 1 km and presented in a format utilized by a number of scientific communities
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