Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS)

In many ways, MTBS is a natural extension of National Park Service-USGS Burn Severity Mapping, with methodology that links back to earlier work by Key and Benson at Glacier National Park. In June 2004, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommended that all federal land management agencies adopt the USGS-NPS burn severity mapping protocol as a monitoring mechanism to assess fire effects and broader wildland fire patterns and trends (GAO. 2004. WILDLAND FIRES: Forest Service and BLM Need Better Information and a Systematic Approach for Assessing the Risks of Environmental Effects. (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04705.pdf). Soon after, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) requested and later supported such a program under the National Fire Plan, which established MTBS in late 2005.

MTBS covers all fires over a minimum size on Federal or State lands throughout the U.S. The USGS Center for EROS and the US Forest Service Remote Sensing Application Center share production activities. Current and future fires are included, as well as past fires back to about 1982. The main goal of MTBS is to generate standard, comparable data to monitor fire trends and management effectiveness on a national level, in contrast to direct emergency response applications. MTBS annually reports to WFLC on the area burned by severity class and other stratifications, and provides technology transfer, remote sensing data, and derivative products on fire extent and severity to the general fire science community. Current products are based on Landsat imagery and the dNBR obtained during the growing season after fire for an extended assessment on most burns. In ecotypes that recover quickly, such as grasslands, results may be based on an initial assessment acquired as soon as suitable data is available after fire.

Processes to help and improve MTBS continue to be explored and evaluated, along with expanded understanding of how various ecosystems respond to fire. There is interest, for example, in how a relative version of dNBR contributes to the definition and mapping of severity in some systems (Miller and Thode 2007). Moreover, investigations that use the burn severity time-series in landscape and fire ecology are of interest, including relationships to climate, trends and modeling of fire behavior, and responses of vegetation and wildlife. Current contributions are also made to MTBS in a science advisory capacity. That involves development of instructional materials and guidance, for example on scene selection, severity classification and thresholding, image processing, and dNBR normalization . . . training and assistance in field sampling using CBI . . . developing a set of reference fires to serve in calibration across MTBS analysts . . . quality review of products . . . and creating a photo series of the burn severity continuum in key ecosystems of the U.S.

More information: Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Website
Return to: Post-fire Burn Assessment by Remote Sensing on Federal Lands