Assessment of landscape fires in 2020 in Russia

Abstract

Landscape fires are one of the main factors of anthropogenic vegetation and soil transformation, as well as anthropogenic climate change. Despite this, until now there have been no detailed estimates of the scale of all types of landscape fires throughout Russia for a full calendar year. This work was aimed at providing such an assessment for landscape fires in 2020, as well as creating a publicly available map of these fires. The fires were mapped by experts and specially trained volunteers on the basis of Sentinel-2 MSI medium spatial resolution satellite images (20 m/pixel) for two periods — from January 1 to May 15, and from May 16 to December 31 inclusive. The total area of identified landscape fires was 25.84 million hectares. The division of the identified fires into presumably controlled (prescribed burning) and uncontrolled (actually fires) was not carried out within the framework of this work. However, the burned areas, corresponding to the area criterion established for single prescribed burnings (up to 10 hectares), account for only 0.96% of the total area of detected fires. The final map of landscape fires, compiled as a result of this work, is available in the public domain at https://maps.greenpeace.org/maps/gpru/fires_2020.

Keywords

• landscape fires
• abandoned lands
• spring fires
• forest fires