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Agricultural Burning

Definition

Burned Area: A grid cell map indicating the area affected by fire within agricultural land (including perennial and non-perennial croplands, managed grasslands, rangelands, and seasonally fallow lands) that is intentionally burned before sowing, during the season, or after harvest, usually to manage residue and cycle nutrients.

Active Fire: A map indicating the presence (including additional ancillary information such as date, time, latitude, longitude, radius buffer, fire radiative power, etc.) of a thermal anomaly within agricultural land (including perennial and non-perennial croplands, managed grasslands, rangelands, and seasonally fallow lands).

GEOGLAM Agriculture Indicator Category
Agricultural Land Includes or is Indicated by

Agriculture Mask

Within Season Requirements:
Application or Policy Supported Related Variables Frequency of Update Spatial Unit

Areas supported include:

  1. UNFCCC (GHG inventories and NDCs)
  2. Air Quality 
  3. Insurance/Risk
  4. Land Degradation Neutrality
  5. Quantification of Ecosystem Services (commodity and direct markets)
  6. On-farm Nutrient Management Decisions
     

Burned Area: Daily update but with sufficient observation frequency to observe the burning before the burn signature is lost (e.g. field plowing).

Active Fire: Near-real-time observations at least every 1-3 hours using sensors with <10m resolution for croplands and <400m for rangelands. **

**Ideally for the small field burns, observations at 5 - 10m spatial resolution, to ensure the geolocation accuracy of the fire pixel is smaller than the field size, every hour is required (with the appropriate spectral bands for fire mapping that are not currently available on commercial satellites)

Burned Area: Pixel-based burned area
Cropland/Crop Type = <5m
Rangeland = 10-30m

Active Fire
Cropland/Crop Type = <10m; constraint is field dimensions and the fire detection bands wavelength
Rangeland = <400m