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Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC) Assessment Burned Areas Boundaries for 2001-2024

These data products are preliminary burn severity assessments derived from post sensor data (including Landsat TM, Landsat ETM+, Landsat OLI, Sentinel 2A, and Sentinel 2B). The pre-fire and post-fire subsets included were used to create a differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) image. The dNBR image attempts to portray the variation of burn severity within a fire. The severity ratings are influenced by the effects to the canopy. The severity rating is based upon a composite of the severity to the understory (grass, shrub layers), midstory trees and overstory trees. Because there is often a strong correlation between canopy consumption and soil effects, this algorithm works in many cases for Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams whose objective is a soil burn severity assessment. It is not, however, appropriate in all ecosystems or fires. It is expected that BAER teams will adjust the thresholds to match field observations to produce a soil burn severity. This map layer is a vector polygon shapefile of the location of all currently inventoried fires occurring between calendar year 2001 and 2024 for CONUS, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Fires omitted from this mapped inventory are those where suitable satellite imagery was not available, or fires which were not discernable from available imagery.

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Author(s) United States Geological orcid, US Forest Service orcid, Kurtis Nelson orcid
Publication Date 2025-01-14
Beginning Date of Data 2001
Ending Date of Data 2024
Data Contact
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/P97UMU6K
Citation Geological, U.S., Service, U.F., and Nelson, K., 2025, Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC) Assessment Burned Areas Boundaries for 2001-2024: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P97UMU6K.
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Metadata Date 2025-01-29
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License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
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Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2025-03-13T15:07:31.970Z