FIREDpy: Fire perimeter datasets for every country on earth.

Background/Question/Methods

Firedpy is a recently developed software package that delineates events creates fire perimeters from the MODIS MCD64A1 burned area product for anywhere on earth, from 2001-present. The software automatically downloads monthly gridded burned date estimates from MODIS, aggregates pixels into events based on spatial-temporal parameters defined by the user, and outputs event perimeters. It also calculates a suite of statistics about each event, some of which (e.g. fire spread rate) are not available for products derived from other satellites like Landsat. It also optionally extracts the landcover type for the year before the fire, and world or North American ecoregions.

Results/Conclusions

We have now generated fire perimeters for every country from 2001-summer 2021. The software is under active development, is open source and free to use. If a user needs a more up-to-date set of fire perimeters, or for a particular area, they can run the code themselves using a simple command line interface. We invite the fire science community to use firedpy, contribute to its development, and we welcome any feedback.