Implementation and validation of MODIS fire products for the investigation of land cover dynamics in Brazil

Principal Investigators:

J. Morisette NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
W. Schroder and J. Pereira Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaveis (IBAMA), Brazil
I. Csiszar University of Maryland, Department of Geography

Co-Investigator:

Douglas Morton University of Maryland, Department of Geography

This collaborative project is part of the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) program. The project focuses on quantifying the uncertainty in satellite derived fire and burn scar products in the Brazilian Amazon, concentrating primarily on products derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors flown aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites.

The Maryland, NASA, and IBAMA team is building on previous efforts that link fire and land cover dynamics by quantifying the spatial extent of fire in the Amazon and characterizing fire types based on the nature of land use changes. The project provides data and tools to determine where fire leads to land-cover change and where it maintains land cover in a state of equilibrium. The first step in this process is to analyze the quality of the fire data and the effects of limited spatio-temporal coverage. Evaluation of the MODIS fire data is accomplished through a series of field campaigns in the Brazilian Amazon. Field observations of prescribed burns and coincident aircraft and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection (ASTER) sensor data enable the team to evaluate the MODIS data quality. Once the characteristics of the MODIS fire data are established, they will be combined with the time series of the MODIS vegetation index (VI) product to differentiate between "conversion" fires, the result of recent deforestation, and "maintenance" fires, fires used to rehabilitate degraded pasture areas or to clear woody material from agricultural fields.