Using the Landsat Burned Area Products to Derive Fire History Relevant for Fire Management and Conservation in the State of Florida, Southeastern USA

Abstract

Development of comprehensive spatially explicit fire occurrence data remains one of the most critical needs for fire managers globally, and especially for conservation across the southeastern United States. Not only are many endangered species and ecosystems in that region reliant on frequent fire, but fire risk analysis, prescribed fire planning, and fire behavior modeling are sensitive to fire history due to the long growing season and high vegetation productivity. Spatial data that map burned areas over time provide critical information for evaluating management successes. However, existing fire data have undocumented shortcomings that limit their use when detailing the effectiveness of fire management at state and regional scales. Here, we assessed information in existing fire datasets for Florida and the Landsat Burned Area products based on input from the fire management community. We considered the potential of different datasets to track the spatial extents of fires and derive fire history metrics (e.g., time since last burn, fire frequency, and seasonality). We found that burned areas generated by applying a 90% threshold to the Landsat burn probability product matched patterns recorded and observed by fire managers at three pilot areas. We then created fire history metrics for the entire state from the modified Landsat Burned Area product. Finally, to show their potential application for conservation management, we compared fire history metrics across ownerships for natural pinelands, where prescribed fire is frequently applied. Implications of this effort include increased awareness around conservation and fire management planning efforts and an extension of derivative products regionally or globally.

Mapping Wetland Burned Area from Sentinel-2 across the Southeastern United States and Its Contributions Relative to Landsat-8 (2016–2019)

“…This step, while reducing commission error in the annual mosaic, also contradicted our original argument that observation count is key to wetland fire detection [11,12,25]. An alternative approach is to threshold and segment burn area from predicted burn probability surfaces instead of using burn count [27,34]. Using burn probability instead of burn count potentially retains burned areas that are only visible in a single image.…”

“…Explicitly training algorithms on both prescribed fires and wildfires can help improve an algorithm's performance, which we saw, by the Sentinel-2 burned area identifying more area of the perimeter dataset as burned, relative to the Landsat-8 BA. However, mapping prescribed fires as distinct from wildfires will require relating remotely sensed BA products to prescribed fire records and datasets [51], which remains challenging [27].…”

“…This precipitation also supports the rapid regrowth of fire-adapted plant species, limiting the time over which a burned area is visible [25,26]. Prescribed fires are also common across the region, ignited purposely in support of agriculture, silviculture, and wildlife management to decrease wildfire ignitions, spread, burn severity, and control fuel loads [26,27]. However, prescribed fires are typically surface fires that are lower in burn severity and can be challenging to remotely detect [21,28,29].…”

Can restoration of fire‐dependent ecosystems reduce ticks and tick‐borne disease prevalence in the eastern United States?

“…Prescribed burning in urban or suburban residential areas or park spaces (e.g., wooded parks, meadows) can be challenging where fire is not widely used, fire managers are inexperienced in the application of prescribed fire, and public perceptions of fire are negative. However, in areas that already have strong prescribed fire programs, burning in or adjacent to urban/suburban environments is common, with examples of such management in southern New Jersey (Warner et al, 2020), Albany, New York (Lee et al, 2019), around Charleston, South Carolina (Coates et al, 2020), and throughout much of Florida (Teske et al, 2021). Similarly, federal financial and planning assistance supports prescribed burning on private lands in these areas (e.g., the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service), either by consultants or private landowners themselves; however, legislation and a general lack of landowner understanding of prescribed fire remains a limitation on private land burning (Wilbur et al, 2021).…”

Contemporary (1984–2020) fire history metrics for the conterminous United States and ecoregional differences by land ownership

“…1. Fire Frequency (FRQ), or the number of times (years) each pixel burned over the period of record (Teske et al 2021). This value cannot be greater than the number of years in the fire history record.…”