The accuracy of areas of peat fires are important component will be impact on the result of emission from peat fires. Most of the approaches used in the determination of peatfires areas based on burnt areas that derived from hotspot. The problem, burnt area just represent areas burnt scar in the above ground, we didn't know these of peat fire or no.
Higher concentration of organic matter may also appear as burnt scar, Biochar, compost heaps, Farm yard manures and more importantly the soil texture and structure are important to know this. But its an important question
Peat fires are very complex process as they can even burn underground, reignite after the winter if there is a source of oxygen. Through remote sensing identifying burnt scar in Peatlands are very difficult, however, persistent smoke is the only way to recognize fire in Peatlands. If the fire in peatland is surface fire it becomes easy to identify the burnt area using two sets of satellite imageries (pre and post fire).
Yup I agree your opinion C.P. Singh, so if we just using the burnt are to identify peat fires are over estimated because some areas maybe just get surface fire not until peat fires, right?what do you think if we overlay with forest cover change to minimize this error, if fire on the area forest and after fire change to non forest (clearing, open area), we assume that fire is high intensity so have possibility become peat fire, and if fire on the non forest area. If fire on the forest and after fire the cover still forest, we assume that this fire didn't have enough to get peat fire. thanks
Just using burnt area as measure of peat fire can be underestimation rather. Because, peat fires can be active for long time underneath. Peat fires are difficult to detect directly through remote sensing as there could be forest cover obscuring the direct detection as heat anomaly. The smoke product can be taken as surrogate to peat fire in such cases where direct detection of active fire is not possible. Burnt area can be used in cases where it suits anyway. Regards
I think this depends on how you assess the burnt area. For the last few years the UK has used had data from its Fire and Rescue service on fires which they have been called to put out. This gives details of the vegetation cover, so we can be fairly confident that fires which are recorded on heather moorland (which is the main peatland habitat in the UK) are peatland fires, although this does not necessarily mean that the peat has been burnt - if the fire service arrive quickly enough the fire may only affect the vegetation. However we know that there are peatland fires which are managed burns by land managers which are not reported to the Fire and Rescue service because they are not out of control. Again these may or may not affect the peat itself.
For previous years where we do not have Fire and Rescue service data on peatland fires were use remotely sensed data from the thermal anomally data. We know that some of this is not due to peatland fires e.g some may be due to industrial activities in areas which are surrounded by peatland. To screen out these fires the data analysis considers how long the thermal anomaly persists - if the anomaly continues for more than a few days it is excluded as it is unlikely that a fire would persist for this long.
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