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Prairie Fire Assessment of Burned Areas Boundaries for Flint Hills Region

Metadata Updated: November 20, 2025

This product ("Prairie fires") presents burned area boundaries for The Flint Hills Ecoregion (KS and OK), one of the most fire prone ecosystems in the United States where hundreds of thousands of acres burn annually as prescribed fire and wildfire. The prairie fire products provide the extent of larger prairie fires in the Flint Hills to record the occurrence of fire and can be used to identify individual burned areas within the perimeters. This product is published to provide fire information of the most fire prone ecosystems to individuals and land management communities for assessing burn extent and impacts on a time sensitive basis. The methods used to produce the prairie fire products from 2009 to present are different than Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Program (MTBS) methods. The product is developed by running a classification tree model on Landsat and Sentinel imagery for all available image dates with visible fires and without greater than 80 percent cloud cover in the spring of each year. The model takes each image, uses all Landsat bands 2-7 or Sentinel 2b bands 2-4, 8, 11, and 12, and finds thresholds between burnt and unburnt areas to create perimeters. Fire perimeters are created by the model and no manual editing is performed. Thus, these data are 100 percent (model based) auto-generated, however, analysts do review and remove small polygons less than 3 acres. The Prairie Fire dataset will include multi-part polygons and have one record for each source image date. These new methods are optimized to efficiently map and characterize the large number of fires that occur in this region on an annual basis. Prior to 2009, the standard MTBS fire mapping methods were used. Because of the unique frequency and extent of fire in this prairie biome, these fire products are now delivered through the Burn Severity Portal and are no longer included as part of the MTBS products unless a fire is identified in IRWIN, NFPORS or a legacy federal fire occurrence database. The provided data products will vary slightly based on the mapping methodology applied at the time of fire occurrence (pre-2019 or 2019 and later). This map layer is a vector polygon shapefile of fires occurring three acres and greater in size between calendar year 1986 and 2024 for the Flint Hills Ecoregion.

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 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date November 20, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date November 20, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-63b62140d34e92aad3cacaaf
Data Last Modified 2024-08-22T00:00:00Z
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 f5c4aa0a-d0ec-4bcb-a03c-fd4b6ad94988
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 6248610c0e29d0901a343c06a30b7b61bb1e81c76bc035075325cb2c9338ad59
Source Schema Version 1.1

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