Canada Landsat Burned Severity product 1985-2015 (CanLaBS)
This data publication contains a set of files in which different variables related to fire burned severity (Canada Landsat Burned Severity, CanLaBS) were computed for all events in Canada between 1985 and 2015 as detected by the Canada Landsat Disturbance (CanLaD (Guindon et al. 2017 and 2018) product. Details on the creation of this product are available in Guindon et al. 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfr-2020-0353) and in supplementary materials accompanying the publication. The current document is therefore a complement to the article and supplementary materials. The supplementary materials are referenced in the publication (cjfr-2020-0353suppla, cjfr-2020-0353supplb etc.).
This is the first Canada-wide product that aims to promote nationwide research on fire severity by making available the data used in the article. The data is in the form of grids composed of pixels at a resolution of 30m. To simplify the distribution and manipulation of the data and considering that two or three fire occurrences within a given location is rare (respectively 2.3% and less than 0.01%), only the most recent fire data are considered in the final product. For these very rare cases, from 2015 to 1985, the most recent burned areas overlap the older data. Overlapping fire count can be found in layer “CanLaBS_Nbdisturb_v0”, multiple fire events in same areas have values equal to or greater than two.
Landsat radiometric values for calculating the NBR index were derived from summer Landsat mosaics (July and August), for years 1984 to 2015 (Guindon et al. 2018). These mosaics were developed from individual USGS Landsat scenes with surface reflectance correction (Masek et al., 2006; Vermote et al., 2006). For each annual compound, the pixel with the less atmospheric opacity was selected. An algorithm was also developed to remove clouds that were not detected by the cloud masks provided with the USGS data.
Here is a general description of the layers provided and a more technical description can be found in Table 1 (see "Ressources" section below):
1. NBR and dNBR. All these values are multiplied by 1000. The value of dNBR represents the value obtained for NBRpre - NBRpost. It is calculated for each pixel that was classified as a fire in CanLaD, according to the corrected year (see cjfr-2020-0353suppla).
2. Year of fire. The fire years detected in CanLaD (Guindon et al. 2018) was corrected using different fire databases, this layer contains the correct year. (see cjfr-2020-0353suppla)
3. Julian Days of the Fire, based on various high-resolution products. However, this variable is only available from 1989 onwards.
4. Presence of salvage logging one year after the fire. Classification of satellite images detecting scarified soils (see cjfr-2020-0353suppld).
5. Pre-fire forest attributes: Pre-fire forest attributes values were calculated for median mosaics, from 1985 to 2000. These attributes values were derived from NFI (national forest inventory) photo-plot attributes and were spatialized. Pre-fire attribute values were created to stratify the analyses (see cjfr-2020-0353supplc). The predicted variables are as follows:
• Canopy density in percent.
• Predicted living biomass in tonnes per hectare.
• Percentage coniferous biomass proportion of total biomass.
• Percentage hardwood biomass proportion of total biomass.
• Percentage unknown species biomass proportion of total biomass. Note, as unknown species are found especially in northern areas, they are considered coniferous for the purpose of the article.
6. Missing remote sensing data, one year after the fire. The estimation of burned severity needs NBR data (NBRpost) in the next year after fire occurrences. NBRpost is available for 91% of the cases, but for the remaining 9%, no data were available due to the presence of clouds. For these cases, satellite data from the years following the fire were used with a regression radiometry correction. This gives values to missing data for year following the fire. This layer flags the areas that have derived data. The values of 1= one year after the fire (no regression), 2= two years after the fire (regression), 3= three years after the fire (regression) and 4= four years after the fire (no regression, set as missing data). (see cjfr-2020-0353supplb).
7. Areas with more than one fire disturbance between 1985 and 2015 (1=one single disturbance, 2=two or more, 3=three or more).
## Data citation:
1. Guindon, L., Villemaire P., Manka F., Dorion H. , Skakun R., St-Amant R., Gauthier S. : Canada Landsat Burned Severity (CanLaBS): a Canada-wide Landsat-based 30-m resolution product of burned severity since 1985
https://doi.org/10.23687/b1f61b7e-4ba6-4244-bc79-c1174f2f92cd
2. The creation, the validation and the limits of the CanLaBS product are describe in the text and supplementary material: Guindon, L., Gauthier, S., Manka, F., Parisien, MA, Whitman, E., Bernier, P., Beaudoin, A., Villemaire P., Skakun R. Trends in wildfire burn severity across Canada, 1985 to 2015
https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfr-2020-0353
## References cited:
1. Guindon, L., Villemaire, P., St-Amant, R., Bernier, P.Y., Beaudoin, A., Caron, F., Bonucelli, M., and
Dorion, H. 2017. Canada Landsat Disturbance (CanLaD): a Canada-wide Landsat-based 30m
resolution product of fire and harvest detection and attribution since 1984.
https://doi.org/10.23687/add1346b-f632-4eb9-a83d-a662b38655ad
2. Guindon, L., Bernier, P., Gauthier, S., Stinson, G., Villemaire, P., & Beaudoin, A. (2018). Missing forest cover gains in boreal forests explained. Ecosphere, 9(1), e02094.
https://doi.org//10.1002/ecs2.2094
3. Masek, J.G., Vermote, E.F., Saleous N.E., Wolfe, R., Hall, F.G., Huemmrich, K.F., Gao, F., Kutler, J., and Lim, T-K. (2006). A Landsat surface reflectance dataset for North America, 1990–2000. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 3(1):68-72.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LGRS.2005.857030.
4. Vermote, E., Justice, C., Claverie, M., & Franch, B. (2016). Preliminary analysis of the performance of the Landsat 8/OLI land surface reflectance product. Remote Sensing of Environment.
Simple
- Date ( RI_367 )
- 2020
- Date ( RI_366 )
- 2020
1 (418) 648-5849
www.rncan.gc.ca/forets/centres-recherche/cfl/13474
1 (418) 648-5849
www.rncan.gc.ca/forets/centres-recherche/cfl/13474
- Presentation form
- mapDigital;carteNumérique RI_391
- Status
- completed; complété RI_593
- Maintenance and update frequency
- asNeeded; auBesoin RI_540
- Keywords ( RI_528 )
-
- forest wildfire severity maps
- Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus Thésaurus des sujets de base du gouvernement du Canada ( Theme )
-
- Forest fires
- Remote sensing
- Use limitation
- Open Government Licence - Canada (http://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada)
- Access constraints
- license; licence RI_606
- Use constraints
- license; licence RI_606
- Use limitation
- 1- This database is not designed to study a single fire or a limited number of fires but rather to study large areas with several fires. No radiometric correction or change were made per fire such as the offset method, or a mean, or median approach for pixels of the same year (see cjfr-2020-0353supplb). Even if the reflectance of the images used was corrected at ground level, there may be radiometric differences within the same fire due to the use of different Landsat scenes. The different atmospheric corrections between two adjacent scenes are therefore sometimes perceptible. Justifications for not applying more corrections for these cases are mainly due to the too low number of pixels available per fire for the months of July and August, especially in certain regions and for certain periods of time. In order to obtain a standardized and consistent database in space and time, all pixels had to be treated the same way. These points are discussed in the article and in the supplementary material (see cjfr-2020-0353supplb).
- Use limitation
- 2- Julian days per fire were estimated using Hotspot detection products made from coarse resolution satellite images (see article). As a fire burns over several days, only the first date was used to assign the date of a fire. Missing data value was given in the case of missing satellite data (particularly prior to 1989), or in the case of small fires for which no Julian day data were available.
- Use limitation
- 3- Burnt areas that have undergone salvage logging were detected using a classification approach. This is not an exhaustive mapping of all areas that were salvage logged beyond one year after the fire, the goal was to eliminate these areas from the analyses, as the post-fire values (NBRpost) would be biased by the absence of trees and by the presence of soil disturbed by scarification.
- Use limitation
- 4- Fires in forests that have been severely affected by the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana ) or other defoliators should ideally not be considered in analyses, as the pre-fire NBR values are a priori already very low and may lead to a bias in analyses of dNBR. Unfortunately, no nationwide mapping of areas severely disturbed by these insects existed at the time this dataset was created.
- Use limitation
- 5- The 1985 and 2015 fires represent the beginning and end years of the time series, it is possible that some fires are incomplete for these years, and perhaps to a lesser extent for the 1986 and 2014 fires.
- Use limitation
- 6- Pixels of isolated fires exist and have not been removed, because some evidence indicated the presence of a fire: on the one hand they were detected by CanLaD and, on the other hand, these pixels also intersected one of the five fire databases used at different spatial resolutions, some of which were coarse (see cjfr-2020-0353suppla). It is recommended to be careful when using these pixels. Note that these pixels were ignored in the analyses for the article, only groups of 12 contiguous pixels were considered.
- Spatial representation type
- grid; grille RI_636
- Distance
- 30 http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ISO_19139_Schemas/resources/uom/gmxUom.xml#m
- Metadata language
- eng
- Character set
- utf8; utf8 RI_458
- Topic category
-
- Geoscientific information
- Environment
- Imagery base maps earth cover
- Environment description
- R (rGdal, raster), GDAL utilities and libraries, IDL
- Begin date
- 1985
- End date
- 2015
))
- Reference system identifier
- http://www.spatialreference.org/ref/sr-org/8787/ / SR-ORG:8787 /
- Distribution format
-
-
GeoTIF
(
N/A
)
-
GeoTIF
(
N/A
)
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353suppla.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353supplb.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353supplc.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353suppld.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353supple.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353supplf.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
cjfr-2020-0353supplg.pdf
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;PDF;eng
- OnLine resource
-
Raster file download directory
(
HTTPS
)
Dataset;TIFF;zxx
- OnLine resource
-
TABLE 1. File description (table is in CSV format)
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;CSV;fra
- OnLine resource
-
TABLE 1. File description (table is in CSV format)
(
HTTPS
)
Supporting Document;CSV;eng
- File identifier
- b1f61b7e-4ba6-4244-bc79-c1174f2f92cd XML
- Metadata language
- eng; CAN
- Character set
- utf8; utf8 RI_458
- Hierarchy level
- dataset; jeuDonnées RI_622
- Date stamp
- 2020-11-18T03:32:08
- Metadata standard name
- North American Profile of ISO 19115:2003 - Geographic information - Metadata
- Metadata standard version
- CAN/CGSB-171.100-2009
1 (418) 648-5849
www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/research-centres/lfc/13473
Overviews

Spatial extent
))
Provided by
