Fire perimeters for eastern Siberia taiga and tundra from 2001-2020

• Main Authors: Anna Talucci, Michael Loranty, Heather Alexander
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2021
• Subjects: eastern Siberia; Fire activity; Bering tundra; Cherskii-Kolyma Mountain tundra; Chukchi Peninsula tundra; East Siberian taiga; Northeast Siberian coastal tundra; Northeast Siberian taiga; Taimyr-Central Siberian tundra; Trans-Baikal Bald Mountain tundra; Kolyma; Chukchi; Chukchi Peninsula; taiga; Taimyr; Tundra; Siberia
• Online Access: https://search.dataone.org/view/urn:uuid:c7b08c2a-6b1a-47cf-84e1-f565515d0ded

We developed a fire perimeter dataset for eastern Siberian taiga and tundra zones from 2001-2020 based on Landsat imagery. Our study area spanned 7.8 million square kilometers across eight ecozones of eastern Siberian taiga and tundra from approximately 61-72.5°North (N) and 100°East (E)-176°West (W). We used the cloud computing power of Google Earth Engine to access the Landsat archive. We generated composite images for the annual growing season (May - September), which allowed us to mitigate missing data from snow-cover, cloud-cover, and the Landsat 7 scan line error. We used annual composites to calculate the difference Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) for each year. Finally, we converted the annual dNBR images to binary burned or unburned imagery that was used to vectorize fire perimeters. We map 22,110 fires burning 150.5 million hectares over 20 years.