Landsat-derived fire history metrics to provide critical information for prioritizing prescribed fire across the Southeast

Detailed information about past fire history is critical for understanding fire impacts and risk, as well as prioritizing conservation and fire management actions.  Yet, fire history information is neither consistently nor routinely tracked by many agencies and states, especially on private lands in the Southeast.  Remote sensing data products offer opportunities to do so but require additional processing to condense and facilitate their use by land managers.  Here, we propose to generate fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Products for the southeastern US.  We will develop code for a processing pipeline that utilizes USGS high-performance computing resources, evaluate Amazon cloud computing services, and deliver our data products through USGS Science Base Catalog and Google Earth Engine. These products will help our stakeholders better understand past fire history and identify areas in greatest need of management actions, helping to make efficient use of limited resources.



Principal Investigator : Todd J Hawbaker

Co-Investigator : Joe Noble, Jim Smith, Casey Teske, Melanie K Vanderhoof