High resolution global forest burned area changes monitoring using landsat 7/8 images

Forest fires have significant impacts on forest ecosystems. In the past two decades various remote sensing based global burned area (BA) products have been proposed and have provided critical insights into trends and patterns of forest fire occurrence. However, these products are primarily provided at coarse native spatial resolution. In this study, the novel high spatial resolution (30 m) global forest BA products during 2014–2021 were developed using full time series Landsat 7/8 archived images. The spatiotemporal patterns of forest BA were characterized at both the global and regional scales. We found that the annual global forest BA for the years 2014 through 2021 varied from 214.57 million hm² to 256.80 million hm², with an average of 238.51 million hm² during the study period. Among the six continents, Africa had the largest proportion of forest BA, averagely accounting for approximately 85.35% of the world’s total, and the amount of global forest BA was largely determined by Africa. Change analysis demonstrates that the forest area burned in the globe and Africa remained relatively stable from 2014 to 2021. However, forest BA in South America showed an increasing trend during the same period, mainly due to human-induced deforestation activities, which increased fire occurrence driven by land use changes. Climate anomalies, such as El Niño and La Niña phenomena, and abnormal meteorological conditions also exerted obvious influences on forest BA changes. Influencing factor analysis indicates that El Niño was more likely to promote forest fires than La Niña.