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Annual burn severity mosaics for the southeastern United States (2000-2022)

Metadata Updated: October 29, 2025

The southeastern United States experiences frequent wild and prescribed fire activity. Mapped burn severity products in the southeastern U.S. face challenges accurately characterizing fire effects due to rapid post-fire recovery limiting observation windows, limited availability of cloud-free imagery, spectral confusion within wetland areas, and operational constraints. As mapped burn severity datasets are generally focused on large wildfires, the many small and prescribed fires of the Southeastern U.S. are not well-represented in existing burn severity products. Accurate and detailed characterization of burn severity across the region is significant to the estimation of fire-related emissions, measurement of fuel loads and aboveground carbon storage, and guiding land management activities. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed an algorithm to improve the prediction of post-fire burn severity within the southeastern United States. A burn severity model was developed utilizing over 5000 Composite Burn Inventory (CBI) plots, where post-fire impacts were characterized in the field for 232 unique fire events across the continental US. For each CBI plot location, predictor variables were generated from ARD Landsat scenes capturing first and second-order fire effects, climate norms, and fire seasonality. A gradient-boosted decision tree model was developed to predict post-fire burn severity as a CBI value (0-3), aligning field and satellite observations of fire effects. The model was applied to the extent of burned area identified by the Landsat Burned Area Product to generate annual (2000-2022) burn severity mosaics of predicted CBI burn severity for 78 ARD Landsat tiles encompassing the southeastern United States. These data provide an improved characterization of burn severity in the southeastern United States, with support for small and prescribed fire activity.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date September 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 29, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 29, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-6679ece1d34ebef1f8a8cdca
Data Last Modified 2024-10-28T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 875a7b8c-3422-4f60-81e4-9aef9f5d5f6a
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -99.271364, 23.266343, -74.148654, 38.154498
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash da736bb15bf7508a555607433ec9b3f42668d12ca166989948eb7db2bf19a126
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -99.271364, 23.266343, -99.271364, 38.154498, -74.148654, 38.154498, -74.148654, 23.266343, -99.271364, 23.266343}

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