Work

Co-Burn: Combining dNBR Anchoring and Ordinal Learning for Cross-Event Fire Severity Mapping in New South Wales

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Cross-event fire-severity mapping requires a model to delineate the burned footprint and grade severity within it across wildfires whose spectral expression varies with vegetation and observation conditions. Nominal multiclass models treat the classes as parallel alternatives and leave the order implicit. We introduce Co-Burn, a bi-temporal Siamese model that adds a pre-to-post dNBR channel to the post-fire branch as an NIR-SWIR change anchor and uses a conditional ordinal head to estimate burn presence before high-severity assignment. Ten methods were compared across 14 New South Wales wildfires against a Sentinel-2 FESM-derived three-class target, with 4 complete fires held out from model development and selection. Co-Burn ranked first under both pixel-pooled and event-mean aggregation, reaching 0.520 ± 0.017 and 0.524 ± 0.028 external burned mIoU. Event-level factorial contrasts showed that burned-mIoU effects varied among fires, while dNBR anchoring reduced false-burn rate on all four external events. At the fixed operating point, Co-Burn assigned 19.9% of reference-unburned pixels to burned classes, against 28.9% for the reflectance-only nominal variant. On the hardest held-out fire, limited false-burn expansion coexisted with a downward shift across the ordered severity classes. Co-Burn supports ordered three-class mapping of previously unseen forest fires before target-fire labels become available.

Source: Remote Sensing

DOI: 10.3390/rs18173019

Authors: Yueying Zhang, Jun Shen, Shuqing Yang, Ankur Srivastava, Fanggang Wang

Institutions: North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power, University of Wollongong, University of Technology Sydney, WaterNSW, Beijing Jiaotong University

Language: English

Topic: Fire effects on ecosystems

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,258

Funder: China Scholarship Council