Development of a standard database of reference sites for validating global burned area products

Abstract. Over the past two decades, several global burned area products have been produced and released to the public. However, the accuracy assessment of such products largely depends on the availability of reliable reference data that currently does not exist on a global scale or whose production requires high level dedication of project resources. The important lack of reference data for the validation of burned area products is addressed in this paper. We provide the first Burned Area Reference Database (BARD) that was created by compiling existing reference burned area datasets from different international projects. The Database contains a total of 2769 reference burned area files derived from Landsat or Sentinel-2 imagery. All reference files have been checked for internal quality and are freely provided by the authors. To ensure database consistency, all files were transformed to a common format and were properly documented by following metadata standards. This should help future users of this database to read and convert the files to their own preferred formats or projections. The database is freely available at: https://doi.org/10.21950/BBQQU7 (Franquesa et al., 2020).

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