Vegetation burning in the year 2000: Global burned area estimates from SPOT VEGETATION data

Abstract

[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. 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 km 2 has 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 km 2 of 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.

A new, global, multi‐annual (2000–2007) burnt area product at 1 km resolution

“…These maps are very useful to visualize the correspondence between the data sets. Summaries of the product's accuracy arranged by continent are also provided [Tansey et al, 2004] products are shown. on the web page given above.…”

“…The revisit period of the VEGETATION instrument is around five days. The burnt area algorithm was developed by D. Ershov and colleagues under contract to the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in the GBA2000 project [Tansey et al, 2004]. The algorithm was used successfully over a wide geographical area, on a number of different vegetation types, in the GBA2000 product and it was felt that it could be adapted for application at the global scale.…”

“…Currently, global burnt area products have been limited in time. As its name suggests, the GBA2000 product [see Tansey et al, 2004] was limited to the year 2000. This was also true of the European Space Agency (ESA) GlobScar product [Simon et al, 2004].…”

Lessons to be learned from the comparison of three satellite‐derived biomass burning products

“…It has a swath of 2000 km allowing almost daily global coverage. The GBA was derived using a set of regionally specific algorithms, designed to maximise detections [Tansey et al, 2004]. The GBA thematic product consists of monthly non-accumulative binary (burnt -not burnt) maps for the whole of the globe for the year 2000.…”

“…Nowadays it is widely recognised that a significant fraction of the total amount of atmospheric emission is given by the phenomenon of biomass burning; as a result, numerous studies have been dedicated to the estimation of such a contribution by means of the monitoring of active fires and burned areas from remotely sensed data [Generoso et al, 2003;van der Werf et al, 2004;Ito and Penner, 2004]. However, two major limitations remain when estimating global emissions from biomass burning.…”