How To

User Process

Begin by visiting the Upload page. There are two ‘routes’ you can take to upload a fire event, one where you upload a shapefile defining a pre-defined fire boundary, and another where you provide an appromixate idea of where the fire is.

In either case, you will provide the following information:

An area of interest

This will be the area where the fire event occurred. You can either upload a shapefile defining the burn boundary, or you can draw a polygon on the map to define the area of interest. Both routes are described below.

Date Ranges

Pre-fire and post-fire date ranges to collect imagery. The wider this window, the more satellite passes will be included in the analysis.

Affiliation

The name (or acronym) for your group or organization. This is used to group individual groups’ or users’ disturbance analyses within the Directory.

Fire Event Name

A unique name for this particular fire event. After analysis, you’ll be able to look within your Affiliation and find the fire event by name in the Directory.

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IMPORTANT: The combination of Affiliation and Fire Event Name must be unique - if you use a combination that exists already, you will overwrite the products derived from a previous analysis. Feel free to do this intentionally if you want to test out a few options for date ranges!

Step 1 - Draw an approximate AOI

Using the tools available (either a rectangle or polygon), draw an approximate area of interest where the fire event occurred.

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Step 2 - Submit fire information

Fill out the form with the required information, described above, and click the Submit button.

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Step 3 - Review intermediate disturbance product

After a few moments (to minutes, depending on the size of the fire), you will be presented with a map of the Relativized Burn Ratio (see Methodology) derived from the satellite imagery within the entire approximate AOI.

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Step 4 - Mark ‘seed’ points for fire perimeter segmentation

Using the Marker tool (click the point icon on the left side of the map), click within the burn boundary to provide ‘seed’ points for the fire perimeter segmentation algorithm. Essentially, this limits the burn boundary to those thresholded from your seed points, preventing the algorithm from including areas that are not burned outside of the burn boundary.

You can use mulitple seed points to include areas that are not connected together, but that are part of the same fire event.

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Step 5 - Submit ‘seed’ points

Click the submission icon to submit your seed points.

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Step 6 - Review derived products

If all steps are successful, you will be presented with download links for the derived products.

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Step 1 - Upload a shapefile

You can upload a shapefile (containing .shp, .shx, .prj and optionally, .dbf) defining a known fire boundary.

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Step 2 - Submit fire information

Fill out the form with the required information, described above, and click the Submit button.

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Step 3 - Review derived products

If all steps are successful, you will be presented with download links for the derived products.

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Backend Process

After submission, the tool will:

Step 1

Upload the burn boundary to the backend server (or derive it using your defined AOI)

Step 2

Collect satellite imagery for your selected dates within the burn boundary, producing fire severity metrics. As of now, Sentinel2 imagery is collected via Microsoft Planetary Computers’ STAC API.

Step 3

Attempt to fetch Ecological Dynamics Interpretive Tool dominant cover information.

Step 4

Attempt to fetch Rangeland Analysis Platform biomass data.

If all four of these processes succeed, you will be presented download links for all of the analytical products generated, including an interactive map visualizing the results. If, at any time, you’d like to access these again, you can simply visit the Directory, where you can select your affiliation and fire event name once more to access these files again.

Methodology