Comparison of MODIS and bird in detecting wildfires over large areas in an Australian context

Responding to the threat of wildfire on human and natural resources is important, particularly in countries such as Australia where large areas of land are required to be observed and managed. Remote sensing techniques are an obvious choice in providing fire related information over large areas for emergency services in responding timely to outbreaks of wildfires. The objective of this study was to compare the utility of the MODIS fire products, MOD14 and MCD45, against the experimental small satellite BIRD, using Landsat ETM+ as the validation dataset. The results show that MODIS has the highest accuracy for detecting active fire fronts, with 91.5% compared to BIRD with 83.1%, but that BIRD outperformed MODIS in burn scar detection with 81.5% and 76% compared to MODIS which had 49.5% and 65% for the respective tests.