Johnston Draw (Idaho) High Resolution Burn Severity Map 2023

Accurate mapping of rangeland burn severity is the first step towards managing and mitigating post-fire consequences, but the spatial resolution of freely available, remotely-sensed products is often too coarse to effectively represent the complexity of burned rangelands. We trained a support vector machine to classify burn severity over Johnston Draw (a 1.8 square kilometer prescribed fire study area in southwestern Idaho) at very high spatial resolution (0.5-meter) using post-fire pan-sharpened 8-band Worldview 3 imagery, co-registered with a complimentary pre-fire vegetation map. Burn severity map accuracy was quite high at 88.3% when validated at 1000 randomly distributed points within the study area. In 2023 alone the Bureau of Land Management treated fuels in over 1.2 million acres of rangeland, a quarter of which was treated with prescribed fire, and managing postfire consequences like soil erosion and vegetation recovery requires high-resolution burn severity mapping to inform mitigation on these vast acreages.