French, N.H.F, Allen, J. L., Hall, R. J., Hoy, E. E., Kasischke, E. S, Murphy, K. A. and D. Verbyla. 2008.
Using landsat data to assess fire and burn severity in the North American boreal forest region:an overview and summary of results.
International Journal of Wildland Fire.  (in review)

This special issue presents the results of six studies focused on evaluating the use of satellite data for mapping fire and burn severity in ecosystems located across the boreal and sub-arctic regions of western Canada and Alaska. These ecosystems are dominated by wildfire in a region of low solar elevation, short and variable growing seasons, cold soils with deep organic horizons, discontinuous permafrost that interacts with wildfire to control many biotic and abiotic processes, and highly flammable coniferous forest types that are subject to stand-replacing fires.  Here, fire severity refers to the immediate impacts of fire on the environment, while burn severity is a term used to describe the potential for longer-term change at a site as a result of the impacts of fire. These terms are defined and described in detail later in the paper.The studies presented were primarily undertaken using the field data collection method and satellite remote sensing data process first developed by Key and Benson (2006).  The field observation method used to assess damage from fire is the Composite Burn Index (CBI), and the satellite index used is the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) or the differenced NBR (dNBR) derived from Landsat TM/ETM+ data. Four of the papers in this special issue present comparisons between the NBR and/or dNBR and the CBI (Allen and Sorbel, this issue; Hall et al., this issue; Hoy et al., this issue; Murphy et al., this issue). One paper presents the results of a study on factors that contribute to variations in NBR in high northern latitude areas that are independent of variations in surface reflectance (Verbyla et al., this issue). Finally, one paper evaluates the utility of the CBI for assessing ecosystem characteristics that can be used to assess fire/burn severity in black spruce forests (Kasischke et al., this issue).