A MODIS-based burned area assessment for Russian croplands: Mapping requirements and challenges

Although agricultural burning is banned in Russia, it is still a widespread practice. Accurately monitoring cropland burned area is an important task as these estimates are used in the calculation of cropland burning emissions, which are ultimately utilized in policy making decisions. In this paper we developed an independent estimate of cropland burning in Russia through assessing the capabilities of global burned area products (MCD45A1; Roy et al., 2008 and MCD64A1; Giglio et al., 2009) and our own custom Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) based Cropland Regional Area Burned (CRAB) product. An archive of cropland field state samples was generated from very high resolution (<5 m) imagery allowing us a unique perspective into the challenges of mapping cropland burned area through detailed analysis of the Russian agricultural practices. Our analysis showed all three burned area products were unable to map approximately 95% of burn validation samples, demonstrating that the current coarse resolution (defined here as >= 500 m) satellite capabilities are not adequate for accurately mapping burned area associated with agricultural fires. The transient nature of cropland burns and the climatological conditions of the region require multiple subsequent daily overpasses; however, the small spatial scale of the burns requires moderate (defined here as 10-50 m) spatial resolutions. Future opportunities to accurately map cropland burned area may arise with the Sentinel-2 and Landsat constellation missions. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.