BARD: a global and regional validation burned area database

The FireCCI project is part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme. The project focuses on the Fire Disturbance Essential Climate Variable(ECV) and specifically on 'Burned Area' (BA) products. The main objective of the FireCCI project is the development and improvement of the burned area detection algorithms, including the product validation protocols. The FireCCI project has developed several global BA products: FireCCI31 and FireCCI41 based on MERIS data, FireCCI50 and the last version FireCCI51 based on MODIS data at 250 m spatial resolution (Chuvieco, et al., 2018; Lizundia-Loiola, et al., 2020). In addition, high resolution BA products have been produced for regional or continental scale (e.g. FireCCISFD11 (Roteta, et al., 2019) based on Sentinel-2 data, for Sub-Saharan Africa at 20 m spatial resolution, and FireCCIS1SA10 (Belenguer-Plomer, et al., 2019) derived from Sentinel-1 for 2017 for the Amazon basin in South America). Moreover, the FireCCI project has promoted the research on BA validation methodologies generating statistically rigorous protocols to implement the accuracy assessment of BA product according the CEOS LPVS stage 3 validation requeriments (Padilla, et al., 2014; 2015; 2017). As a result of this research and the BA product validation activities, several global and regional burned area reference datasets were generated and compiled to create a Burned Area Reference Database (BARD) for validation. Contributions from other international projects and researches as BAECV CONUS, BrFLAS, and NOFFI, have significantly increased the BARD database.