ABSTRACT
Wildfires are one of the most important drivers of land cover changes in Russia. They affect annually millions of hectares of forests and other terrestrial ecosystems, such as tundra, grasslands, and peatlands. The integrated burned area assessment approach produces continuous information during the fire season. This chapter presents an approach for the mapping of burned forest area that combines two remote sensing data sources: MODIS and Landsat-TM/ETM+ satellite imagery. This approach is aimed to answer to two main users’ requirements: rapidity of information delivery and accuracy of estimates. The approach includes three complementary burned area products at 1 km, 250 m, and 30 m spatial resolution, respectively. The most spatially accurate burned area product (HRBA) is derived from Landsat-TM/ETM+ imagery. This product on its own does not allow providing a comprehensive burned area assessment at the country level but is considered as complementary to the MODIS data-derived estimates.
