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

Over the past 2 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 do not exist on a global scale or whose production require a high level of 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 Burned Area Reference Database (BARD), the first publicly available database created by compiling existing reference BA (burned area) datasets from different international projects. BARD contains a total of 2661 reference files derived from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery. All those 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. The goal of generating this database was to give BA algorithm developers and product testers reference information that would help them to develop or validate new BA products. BARD is freely available at https://doi.org/10.21950/BBQQU7 (Franquesa et al., 2020).