Project Background

In 2006, WFLC sponsored a 6- year project to map the fire severity and perimeters on large fires (>500 acres in the East and 1000 acres in the West) in the United States across all ownerships for the period of 1984 through 2010. The project is referred to as the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project and is implemented jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey, National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS), and the USDA Forest Service, Remote Sensing Applications Center (RSAC). This work is an extension of the existing cooperation between these two national centers that has provided rapid response burn severity mapping products to Forest Service and Department of the Interior (DOI) Burn Area Emergency Response (BAER) Teams.

The primary objective of this project is to provide for a national analysis of trends in fire severity for the NFP. Due to severe periodic droughts, increased fuel loads, and a higher frequency of uncharacteristic fires in recent years (since 2000), it is essential for the trend analysis to span a significant period of time to better account for variability in factors potentially affecting fire severity, e.g., climate. Secondary objectives include providing geographic and fire-specific data for use at regional and subregional scales to support resource and risk assessments, resource management planning, project planning and implementation, monitoring, and research activities. Sufficiently fine spatial and thematic resolution is necessary to support the wide range of operational and research-related information needs at larger scales.

This project will serve four primary user groups with one set of data and information:

• National policy makers such as WFLC, that require information about long-term trends in burn severity and recent burn severity within vegetation types, fuel models, condition classes, and treatment accomplishments;
• Field managers that benefit from GIS-ready maps and data for informing and supporting prefire and postfire management decisions and monitoring;
• Project managers for existing databases such as LANDFIRE and the National Land Cover Dataset that benefit from burn severity data produced at comparable spatial scales and resolution for validation and updating of geospatial data sets;
• Academic and agency research entities interested in fire severity data over significant geographic and temporal extents.