Abstract
Fire has a diverse range of impacts on Earth's physical and social systems. Accurate and up to date information on areas affected by fire is critical to better understand drivers of fire activity, as well as its relevance for biogeochemical cycles, climate, air quality, and to aid fire management. Mapping burned areas was traditionally done from field sketches. With the launch of the first Earth observation satellites, remote sensing quickly became a more practical alternative to detect burned areas, as they provide timely regional and global coverage of fire occurrence. This review paper explores the physical basis to detect burned area from satellite observations, describes the historical trends of using satellite sensors to monitor burned areas, summarizes the most recent approaches to map burned areas and evaluates the existing burned area products (both at global and regional scales). Finally, it identifies potential future opportunities to further improve burned area detection from Earth observation satellites.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 45-64 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Remote Sensing of Environment |
| Volume | 225 |
| Early online date | 5 Mar 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2019 |
Funding
Several countries have been operationally developing BA mapping products in the framework of various fire monitoring systems. In the United States, the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project was sponsored by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) and implemented jointly with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Forest Service (Eidenshink et al., 2007). The project's objective was the systematic production of BA maps and associated burn severity information. Among the different data employed by the MTBS project, pre-fire and post-fire Landsat TM, Enhanced TM Plus (ETM+), and OLI imagery are mainly used for the computation of the dNBR and the subsequent generation of estimated burn severities.In Greece, an Operational Burned Area Mapping (OBAM) service has been developed in the framework of the National Observatory of Forest Fires (NOFFi) project implemented by the Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) in collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy and financially supported by Greece's Green Fund (Tompoulidou et al., 2016). The NOFFi-OBAM service is based on an OBIA approach and supervised classification models. Any remote sensing imagery (Landsat 8 OLI, Sentinel-2) can be used in the semi-automated classification which is performed with public domain software. In Greece, an Operational Burned Area Mapping (OBAM) service has been developed in the framework of the National Observatory of Forest Fires (NOFFi) project implemented by the Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) in collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy and financially supported by Greece's Green Fund ( Tompoulidou et al., 2016 ). The NOFFi-OBAM service is based on an OBIA approach and supervised classification models. Any remote sensing imagery (Landsat 8 OLI, Sentinel-2) can be used in the semi-automated classification which is performed with public domain software.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Greece's Green Fund | |
| Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | |
| U.S. Geological Survey | |
| U.S. Forest Service | |
| Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy | |
| Research Committee, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | |
| Ministry of Environment | |
| Green Fund | |
| Aristotle University of Thessaloniki |
Keywords
- Burned area
- Climate change
- Fire
- Fire impacts
- Lidar
- Radar
