Wetland burned area extent derived from Sentinel-2 across the southeastern U.S. (2016-2019)

Wildfires and prescribed fires are frequent but under-mapped across wetlands of the southeastern United States . High annual precipitation supports rapid post-fire recovery of wetland vegetation, while associated cloud cover limits clear-sky observations. In addition, the low burn severity of prescribed fires and spectral confusion between fluctuating water levels and burned areas have resulted in wetland burned area being chronically under-estimated across the region. In this analysis, we first quantify the increase in clear-sky observations by using Sentinel-2 in addition to Landsat 8. We then present an approach using the Sentinel-2 archive (2016-2019) to train a wetland burned area algorithm at 20 m resolution. We coupled a Python-derived [...]