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Sentinel-2 Fire Scars - QLD DES algorithm, QLD coverage

Statewide composite of fire scars (burnt area) derived from all available Sentinel-2 images acquired over Queensland. It is available in both monthly and annual composites. Fire scars have been mapped using an automated change detection method, with supplementary manual interpretation. This data contains both automated and manually edited data.

Simple

Identification info

Date (Creation)
2021-06-15
Date (Publication)
2021-07-07
Date (Revision)
2014-07-14
Edition
1.0

Publisher

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
+61 7 3365 9097

Author

Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government - van den Berg, Deanna ()
Ecosciences Precinct, 41 Boggo Road, Dutton Park, QLD, 4102, Australia
Dutton Park
QLD
4102
Australia
Website
https://www.tern.org.au/

Purpose
These state-wide composites of fire scars (burnt areas) provide regular monitoring and mapping of fire scars across Queensland, useful for managing natural resources, assessing fire hazard and risk, understanding the impacts of fire on grazing production and monitoring ecological impacts over time. This product will have data from 2017 onwards. For pre-2017 fire scar data, see the Annual Fire Scars - Landsat, QLD DES algorithm, QLD coverage dataset.
Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Credit
This dataset was produced using satellite-derived products created by the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program using data sourced from the US Geological Survey.
Status
On going

Point of contact

Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government - van den Berg, Deanna ()
Ecosciences Precinct, 41 Boggo Road, Dutton Park, QLD, 4102, Australia
Ecosciences Precinct, 41 Boggo Road
Dutton Park
QLD
4102
Australia
Topic category
  • Environment

Extent

Description
Queensland
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S
E
W


Temporal extent

Time period
2017-01-01
Title
Bastarrika, A.; Chuvieco, E.; Martín, M. P., 2011. Mapping burned areas from landsat tm/etm+ data with a two-phase algorithm: Balancing omission and commission errors. Remote Sensing of Environment., 115, 1003–1012.
Website
Bastarrika, A.; Chuvieco, E.; Martín, M. P., 2011. Mapping burned areas from landsat tm/etm+ data with a two-phase algorithm: Balancing omission and commission errors. Remote Sensing of Environment., 115, 1003–1012.

Related documentation

Title
Goodwin, N. R.; Collett, L. J., 2014. Development of an automated method for mapping fire history captured in Landsat TM and ETM+ time series across Queensland, Australia. Remote Sensing of Environment., 148, 206–221.
Website
Goodwin, N. R.; Collett, L. J., 2014. Development of an automated method for mapping fire history captured in Landsat TM and ETM+ time series across Queensland, Australia. Remote Sensing of Environment., 148, 206–221.

Related documentation

Title
Guerschman, J. P.; Oyarzábal, M.; Malthus, T.; McVicar, T. R.; Byrne, G.; Randall, L.; Stewart, J., 2012. Evaluation of the MODIS-based vegetation fractional cover product. CSIRO., 31.
Website
Guerschman, J. P.; Oyarzábal, M.; Malthus, T.; McVicar, T. R.; Byrne, G.; Randall, L.; Stewart, J., 2012. Evaluation of the MODIS-based vegetation fractional cover product. CSIRO., 31.

Related documentation

Maintenance and update frequency
Monthly
GCMD Science Keywords
  • FIRE HISTORY
ANZSRC Fields of Research
  • ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS
  • Environmental Monitoring
TERN Platform Vocabulary
  • SENTINEL-2A
  • SENTINEL-2B
TERN Parameter Vocabulary
  • fire events
  • Unitless
  • fire events
  • Unitless
GCMD Horizontal Resolution Ranges
  • 1 meter - < 30 meters
GCMD Temporal Resolution Ranges
  • Daily - < Weekly

Resource constraints

Use limitation
The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source and any other nominated parties. Details are provided at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
File name
88x31.png
File description
CCBy Logo from creativecommons.org
File type
png
Linkage
https://w3id.org/tern/static/cc-by/88x31.png

Title
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
Alternate title
CC-BY
Edition
4.0
Website
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Access constraints
License
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints
TERN services are provided on an “as-is” and “as available” basis. Users use any TERN services at their discretion and risk. They will be solely responsible for any damage or loss whatsoever that results from such use including use of any data obtained through TERN and any analysis performed using the TERN infrastructure. <br />Web links to and from external, third party websites should not be construed as implying any relationships with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by TERN. <br /><br />Please advise any work or publications that use this data via the online form at https://www.tern.org.au/research-publications/#reporting
Other constraints
It is not recommended that these data sets be used at scales more detailed than 1:100,000.

Resource constraints

Classification
Unclassified
Supplemental Information
Filenames for the monthly and annual sentinel-2 fire scar products conforms to the AusCover standard naming convention. The standard form of this convention is: <satellite category code><instrument code><product code>_<where>_<when>_<processing stage code>_<additional dataset specific tags> Details for the unique codes used for this dataset can be found in the following table. Data Naming Element | Possible Code(s) | Descriptor satellite category | cv | sentinel-2 instrument | ms | multi-spectral product | re | reflective where | qld | state when | yyyy | single year of data when | yyyymm | single month of data processing stage | afm | fire scar product data projection | a2 | Australian Albers Equal Area

Distribution Information

Distributor

Distributor

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
OnLine resource
/attachment/7b6d2b84-cbf3-46e8-aa8c-c49352f9ffd5/sentinel-2_fire_scars_queensland_filenaming_convention.txt

Distribution Information

Distributor

Distributor

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd, Indooroopilly, QLD, Australia, 4068
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
OnLine resource
Download Fire Scars via HTTP

Distribution Information

Distributor

Distributor

Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government
41 Boggo Road, Dutton Park QLD 4102, Australia
Dutton Park
QLD
4102
Australia
OnLine resource
VegMachine

Data quality info

Hierarchy level
Dataset
Other
All the data described here has been generated from the analysis of Sentinel-2 data acquired as orthorectified images from the European Space Agency. Sentinel-2 imagery has band-dependent spatial resolutions of 10m and 20m. In-house analysis of Sentinel-2 image-to-image registration showed that in over 90% of image pairs, the geometric error was less than 10m. The Sentinel-2 fire scars product has been validated using 480,000 independent observations selected from a range of environments and periods within the fire season across Queensland.

Report

Result

Statement
The validation result showed that a high proportion of burned area was correctly classified (f1score = 0.91) with commission and omission error of 13% and 8% respectively. The omission error does not include burned area missed because of missing data (e.g. long periods without cloud-free images) due to the lack of an independent validation data set. The manual editing applied to the 2020 fire scar product should significantly reduce the number of missed fires, although this has not been quantified.

Resource lineage

Statement
Sentinel-2 surface reflectance data > multiple single-date fractional cover datasets > single-date fire scar mapping > monthly composite of fire scars > annual composite of fire scars
Hierarchy level
Dataset

Process step

Description
Summary: Fire scars were automatically detected in Sentinel-2 imagery using differenced bare soil fraction values obtained using the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program’s (JRSRP) fractional cover model. A Sentinel-2 pixel is identified as likely burnt if there has been a significant increment in bare soil fraction relative to the previous fractional cover values. Once areas of likely change are detected, a region growing algorithm is applied to expand the area to capture the whole fire event. Areas are then filtered into burnt and unburnt classes using a decision tree analysis. Subsequent manual interpretation is used to delineate between false positives and true positives.

Process step

Description
RapidFire algorithm: The RapidFire algorithm is applied to the JRSRP Sentinel-2 fractional cover product. The RapidFire algorithm identifies core pixels of potentially burned area, based on the temporal difference in bare soil cover fraction. Core pixels are spatial clusters (bigger than 15 pixels) where the change in bare cover fraction exceeds an optimised threshold. The extent of the pixels classified as potentially burned are expanded, using a region growing algorithm on the core pixels. An object-oriented classification is used to discriminate between burned and unburned areas. The classification tree was based on the median values of the temporal difference of NBR (dNBR) and NIR + IR (dNIRIR) of each potentially burned area.

Process step

Description
Manual Editing: Manual editing is conducted by trained analysts to reduce the number of false fires and omission errors.

Process step

Description
Monthly Composite: Single date manually-edited fire scar data is composited into monthly periods.

Process step

Description
Annual Composite: All mapped fire scars across QLD in a January to December period are composited together to create annual composites. 1-12: month (of Sentinel-2 acquisition) when fire scar was first detected; 254: crop/water masked (using Current Queensland Land Use Mapping) - no fire scar detection conducted.

Process step

Description
Consistency: Sentinel-2 analysis does not provide a complete record of fire history. Fire scars may be missed or under-mapped due to: 1) Lack of visibility due to cloud, haze and smoke, and cloud shadow; 2) Misclassification as non-fire related change or cloud shadow; 3) Lack of detection due to size or patchiness. Fire scars smaller than 2 ha may not be included; 4) Lack of detection due to rapid regrowth of vegetation. This is particularly an issue when there have been multiple cloud-affected images in the time series; 5) Lack of detection for cool grass/understorey fires, obscured by unburnt vegetation; False burned areas or over-mapping may result from: 1) Omission errors in the cloud/shadow masks, where cloud is classified as fire scar; 2) Areas of high intensity land-use change where the extent of bare ground increases rapidly (e.g cropping, vegetation clearing); 3) Areas of inundation (e.g tidal flats, wetlands, ephemeral lakes and channels).

Process step

Description
Attribute Accuracy: Fire scars may persist and continue to be detected for several months in the image time sequence. Where there has been fire scar persistence or multiple fire scars recorded for a given pixel within the compositing year, the earliest month of detection is recorded.

Process step

Description
RapidFire Approach: This approach has some important consequences: 1) Not all the pixels of an image are analysed due to cloud and shadow effects; 2) Time elapsed between observations for different pixels of the same image may differ, again due to cloud and shadow effects over time; and 3) Burned areas only appear once in the record. If for some reason a burned area is missed in the first unmasked observation it will be missed in the whole record. This new method is a different approach from the previous Landsat-derived fire scar mapping program (1987-2016). That automated time series method identified large negative outliers in reflectance indices (based on NIR and SWIR1 bands) relative to the time series.

Reference System Information

Reference system identifier
EPSG/EPSG:4326

Reference system type
Geodetic Geographic 2D

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/7b6d2b84-cbf3-46e8-aa8c-c49352f9ffd5

Title
TERN GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8

Point of contact

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
+61 7 3365 9097

Type of resource

Resource scope
Dataset
Metadata linkage
https://geonetwork.tern.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/7b6d2b84-cbf3-46e8-aa8c-c49352f9ffd5

Point-of-truth metadata URL

Date info (Creation)
2021-06-15T00:00:00
Date info (Revision)
2023-05-30T00:00:00

Metadata standard

Title
ISO 19115-1:2014/AMD 1:2018 Geographic information - Metadata - Fundamentals
Edition
1

Metadata standard

Title
ISO/TS 19115-3:2016
Edition
1.0

Metadata standard

Title
ISO/TS 19157-2:2016
Edition
1.0
Title
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-3:2016 and ISO 19157-2:2016
Date (published)
2021
Edition
1.0

Identifier

Code
10.5281/zenodo.5652221
Website
https://github.com/ternaustralia/TERN-ISO19115/releases/tag/v1.0

 
 

Overviews

Spatial extent

N
S
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Keywords

ANZSRC Fields of Research
ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS Environmental Monitoring
GCMD Science Keywords
FIRE HISTORY

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Associated resources

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