LANDFIRE (LF) disturbance products are developed to provide temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Historical Disturbance (HDist) is developed from the base LF disturbance products, and attribute code system, to represent the history of disturbance for a 10-year span. Each year's disturbance scenarios are checked against time relevant LF vegetation products to check for logical inconsistencies. Errant codes are flagged and updated to a discard code with the remaining disturbance codes cross-walked to Fuel Disturbance (FDist) codes. HDist development involves a comprehensive review of fuel and disturbance attributes. Starting with LF Remap, HDist replaces Vegetation Disturbance (VDist) from previous LF versions.

LANDFIRE (LF) disturbance products are developed to provide temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Historical Disturbance (HDist) is developed from the base annual LF disturbance products, and attribute code system, to represent the history of disturbance for a 10-year span. Each year's disturbance scenarios are checked against time relevant LF vegetation products to check for logical inconsistencies. Errant codes are flagged and updated to a discard code with the remaining disturbance types cross-walked/aggregated to Fuel Disturbance (FDist) types. HDist includes the year of disturbance that is recorded for that pixel. In LF 2022, the time since disturbance code is the same for both HDist and FDist. Starting with LF 2016 Remap, HDist replaced Vegetation Disturbance (VDist) from previous LF versions.

LANDFIRE (LF) disturbance products are developed to provide temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Historical Disturbance (HDist) is developed from the base annual LF disturbance products, and attribute code system, to represent the history of disturbance for a 10-year span. Each year's disturbance scenarios are checked against time relevant LF vegetation products to check for logical inconsistencies. Errant codes are flagged and updated to a discard code with the remaining disturbance types cross-walked/aggregated to Fuel Disturbance (FDist) types. HDist includes the year of disturbance that is recorded for that pixel (see the HDIST_YR column in the attribute table). The HDist attribute table also contains an HDIST_ID field that is the disturbance year combined with the disturbance code. See the HDIST_CAT column for the FDist code combined with the disturbance code.

LANDFIRE's (LF) Annual Disturbance (Dist) product provides temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Dist depicts areas that have experienced a disturbance within a given year of 4.5 hectares (11 acres) or larger, along with cause and severity. Information sources include national fire mapping programs such as Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), and Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG), local user/agency contributed data (LF Events Geodatabase), and remotely sensed Landsat imagery. Composite Landsat image pairs from the current year, prior year, and following year are spectrally compared to determine where change occurred and its corresponding severity. Additionally, vegetation indices (Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index [NDVI] and Normalized Burn Ratio [NBR]) serve as inputs into the Multi-Index Integrated Change Algorithm (MIICA) (Jin et al. 2013); MIICA outputs and differenced products (e.g., dNDVI and dNBR) are used to locate change. Predictive modeling based on the previous 10 years of disturbance data provides an additional dataset useful for locating disturbance. Image analysts use the aforementioned datasets separately or in combination to isolate true change from false change (e.g., change caused by stark differences in phenology rather than a true disturbance event). The accuracy of the final product is often related to the quality of the Landsat image composite. Areas with persistent cloud cover are particularly challenging (e.g., the northeast US). Fire caused disturbances sourced from MTBS may contain data gaps where clouds, smoke, water or Landsat7 SLC-off stripes exist. Models trained from pre-fire and post-fire Landsat data are used to fill the gaps. The result is continuous severity and extent information for all MTBS fire disturbances. MTBS pixels derived from gap filling techniques, such as modeling, are noted as such in their corresponding attribute table. Smaller fires that do not meet the size criteria set forth by MTBS) may be attributed as a Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV), which are only produced for the lower 48 states. Causality and severity information assigned to a disturbance are prioritized by source, with the highest priorities reserved for fire mapping programs (MTBS, BARC and RAVG) followed by user-contributed events contained in the LF Events Geodatabase, and lastly, Landsat image based change.

LANDFIRE's (LF) Annual Disturbance (Dist) product provides temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Dist depicts areas that have experienced a disturbance within a given year of 4.5 hectares (11 acres) or larger, along with cause and severity. Information sources include national fire mapping programs such as Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), and Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG), local user/agency contributed data (LF Events Geodatabase), and remotely sensed Landsat imagery. Composite Landsat image pairs from the current year, prior year, and following year are spectrally compared to determine where change occurred and its corresponding severity. Additionally, vegetation indices (Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index [NDVI] and Normalized Burn Ratio [NBR]) serve as inputs into the Multi-Index Integrated Change Algorithm (MIICA) (Jin et al. 2013); MIICA outputs and differenced products (e.g., dNDVI and dNBR) are used to locate change. Predictive modeling based on the previous 10 years of disturbance data provides an additional dataset useful for locating disturbance. Image analysts use the aforementioned datasets separately or in combination to isolate true change from false change (e.g., change caused by stark differences in phenology rather than a true disturbance event). The accuracy of the final product is often related to the quality of the Landsat image composite. Areas with persistent cloud cover are particularly challenging (e.g., the northeast US). Fire caused disturbances sourced from MTBS may contain data gaps where clouds, smoke, water or Landsat7 SLC-off stripes exist. Models trained from pre-fire and post-fire Landsat data are used to fill the gaps. The result is continuous severity and extent information for all MTBS fire disturbances. MTBS pixels derived from gap filling techniques, such as modeling, are noted as such in their corresponding attribute table. Smaller fires that do not meet the size criteria set forth by MTBS) may be attributed as a Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV), which are only produced for the lower 48 states. Causality and severity information assigned to a disturbance are prioritized by source, with the highest priorities reserved for fire mapping programs (MTBS, BARC and RAVG) followed by user-contributed events contained in the LF Events Geodatabase, and lastly, Landsat image based change.

LANDFIRE's (LF) Annual Disturbance (Dist) product provides temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Dist depicts areas that have experienced a disturbance within a given year of 4.5 hectares (11 acres) or larger, along with cause and severity. Information sources include national fire mapping programs such as Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), and Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG), local user/agency contributed data (LF Events Geodatabase), and remotely sensed Landsat imagery. Composite Landsat image pairs from the current year, prior year, and following year are spectrally compared to determine where change occurred and its corresponding severity. Additionally, vegetation indices (Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index [NDVI] and Normalized Burn Ratio [NBR]) serve as inputs into the Multi-Index Integrated Change Algorithm (MIICA) (Jin et al. 2013); MIICA outputs and differenced products (e.g., dNDVI and dNBR) are used to locate change. Predictive modeling based on the previous 10 years of disturbance data provides an additional dataset useful for locating disturbance. Image analysts use the aforementioned datasets separately or in combination to isolate true change from false change (e.g., change caused by stark differences in phenology rather than a true disturbance event). The accuracy of the final product is often related to the quality of the Landsat image composite. Areas with persistent cloud cover are particularly challenging (e.g., the northeast US). Fire caused disturbances sourced from MTBS may contain data gaps where clouds, smoke, water or Landsat7 SLC-off stripes exist. Models trained from pre-fire and post-fire Landsat data are used to fill the gaps. The result is continuous severity and extent information for all MTBS fire disturbances. MTBS pixels derived from gap filling techniques, such as modeling, are noted as such in their corresponding attribute table. Smaller fires that do not meet the size criteria set forth by MTBS) may be attributed as a Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV), which are only produced for the lower 48 states. Causality and severity information assigned to a disturbance are prioritized by source, with the highest priorities reserved for fire mapping programs (MTBS, BARC and RAVG) followed by user-contributed events contained in the LF Events Geodatabase, and lastly, Landsat image based change.

LANDFIRE's (LF) Annual Disturbance (Dist) product provides temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Dist depicts areas that have experienced a disturbance within a given year of 4.5 hectares (11 acres) or larger, along with cause and severity. Information sources include national fire mapping programs such as Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), and Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG), local user/agency contributed data (LF Events Geodatabase), and remotely sensed Landsat imagery. Composite Landsat image pairs from the current year, prior year, and following year are spectrally compared to determine where change occurred and its corresponding severity. Additionally, vegetation indices (Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index [NDVI] and Normalized Burn Ratio [NBR]) serve as inputs into the Multi-Index Integrated Change Algorithm (MIICA) (Jin et al. 2013); MIICA outputs and differenced products (e.g., dNDVI and dNBR) are used to locate change. Predictive modeling based on the previous 10 years of disturbance data provides an additional dataset useful for locating disturbance. Image analysts use the aforementioned datasets separately or in combination to isolate true change from false change (e.g., change caused by stark differences in phenology rather than a true disturbance event). The accuracy of the final product is often related to the quality of the Landsat image composite. Areas with persistent cloud cover are particularly challenging (e.g., the northeast US). Fire caused disturbances sourced from MTBS may contain data gaps where clouds, smoke, water or Landsat7 SLC-off stripes exist. Models trained from pre-fire and post-fire Landsat data are used to fill the gaps. The result is continuous severity and extent information for all MTBS fire disturbances. MTBS pixels derived from gap filling techniques, such as modeling, are noted as such in their corresponding attribute table. Smaller fires that do not meet the size criteria set forth by MTBS) may be attributed as a Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV), which are only produced for the lower 48 states. Causality and severity information assigned to a disturbance are prioritized by source, with the highest priorities reserved for fire mapping programs (MTBS, BARC and RAVG) followed by user-contributed events contained in the LF Events Geodatabase, and lastly, Landsat image based change.

LANDFIRE (LF) disturbance products are developed to provide temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Historical Disturbance (HDist) is developed from the base LF disturbance products, and attribute code system, to represent the history of disturbance for a 10-year span. Each year's disturbance scenarios are checked against time relevant LF vegetation products to check for logical inconsistencies. Errant codes are flagged and updated to a discard code with the remaining disturbance codes cross-walked to Fuel Disturbance (FDist) codes. HDist development involves a comprehensive review of fuel and disturbance attributes. Starting with LF Remap, HDist replaces Vegetation Disturbance (VDist) from previous LF versions.

LANDFIRE (LF) disturbance products are developed to provide temporal and spatial information related to landscape change. Historical Disturbance (HDist) is developed from the base LF disturbance products, and attribute code system, to represent the history of disturbance for a 10-year span. Each year's disturbance scenarios are checked against time relevant LF vegetation products to check for logical inconsistencies. Errant codes are flagged and updated to a discard code with the remaining disturbance codes cross-walked to Fuel Disturbance (FDist) codes. HDist development involves a comprehensive review of fuel and disturbance attributes. Starting with LF Remap, HDist replaces Vegetation Disturbance (VDist) from previous LF versions.

The LANDFIRE Annual Disturbance products for 1999-2007 are included within the LF 2001 version and are developed through a multistep process. Inputs to this process include (but are not limited to): Landsat imagery derived Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) data (in CONUS only), polygon data developed by local agencies, fire data obtained from Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), and Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG) fire mapping efforts, and Protected Area Database (PAD) data. Event polygon data are provided to LANDFIRE by various local, regional, and national agencies and organizations. Disturbance type and year information is included as attributes for each polygon and transferred to the disturbance grids. Severity is determined by using dNBR (difference Normalized Burn Ratio) data classified into high, medium, and low severity levels based on a statistical comparison with the MTBS, BARC, and RAVG fire severity. Vegetation Tracker (VCT, Huang, et. al. 2008) algorithms are used to identify disturbances outside of LF 2001 Events. VCT data are developed for each year identifying disturbed areas and severity. Since disturbance type (i.e. causality) is not determined in the VCT process, a spatial analysis was done comparing the VCT output to buffered (1 kilometer) LF 2001 Events and PAD GAP land use characteristics. While not providing a precise type of disturbance, this analysis provides information useful for narrowing down the types of disturbance that could or could not typically occur. Each zone has ten disturbance grids, one for each year 1999 to 2007. Each grid is attributed with year, disturbance type (if known, otherwise a description of possible types), severity, and the data sources used to create the data.