Production of Landsat ETM+ reference imagery of burned areas within Southern African savannahs: comparison of methods and application to MODIS

  • Authors:

  • A. M. S. Smith;N. A. Drake;M. J. Wooster;A. T. Hudak;Z. A. Holden;C. J. Gibbons

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Rangeland Ecology and Management, University of Idaho, Moscow, USA;Department of Geography, King's College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK;Department of Geography, King's College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK;Rocky Mountain Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Moscow, USA;Department of Rangeland Ecology and Management, University of Idaho, Moscow, USA;Peak District National Park Authority, Bakewell DE45 1AE, UK

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Remote Sensing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Accurate production of regional burned area maps are necessary to reduce uncertainty in emission estimates from African savannah fires. Numerous methods have been developed that map burned and unburned surfaces. These methods are typically applied to coarse spatial resolution (1 km) data to produce regional estimates of the area burned, while higher spatial resolution (65% at the MODIS scale, presumably because of the decrease in signal-to-noise ratio as compared to the Landsat scale. At the MODIS scale the Mid-Infrared Bispectral Index (MIRBI) using a fixed threshold of 1.75 was determined to be the optimal regional burned area mapping index (slope = 0.99, r 2 = 0.95, SE = 61.40, y = Landsat burned area, x = MODIS burned area). Application of MIRBI to the entire MODIS temporal series measured the burned area as 10 267 km2 during the 2001 fire season. The char fraction map and the MIRBI methodologies, which both produced reasonable burned area maps within southern African savannah environments, should also be evaluated in woodland and forested environments.