LANDFIRE 2023 Update

Limited Annual Disturbance (LDist) is a new product making its debut with the LF 2023 Update. LDist is designed to provide a first cut of landscape change information as soon as possible to support time-sensitive updates such as risk management efforts. This early release does not include satellite change detection to capture additional disturbances and does not provide image-based severity for contributed events. Some fire program data includes severity which is present in the LANDFIRE LDist product. However, many fires and disturbance events lack severity assignments, therefore LDist severity is a default based on disturbance type (Clearcut = High Severity, Wildfire = Medium Severity, all others including prescribed fire = Low Severity).

LDist includes data inputs from the following sources:

• Fire program perimeters and burn severity where available from four sources: Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC), Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire (RAVG), Landsat Burned Area (BA)
• Event polygon datasets submitted from three national contributors: US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Park Service (NPS), and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)
• Event polygon datasets obtained from four online national sources: Forest Service Activity Tracking System (FACTS), National Fire Plan Operations and Reporting System (NFPORS), National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), USFS National Insect and Disease Risk Map (NIDRM)

The LDist product featured in the LF 2023 update (named LDist23) is the first of three Annual Disturbance products being released in 2024. LDist23 is an early "draft" of the LANDFIRE Annual Disturbance product and includes fires, disturbance events, and land management activities for Fiscal Year 2023 (FY2023) from trusted national sources obtained in November 2023.

Preliminary Annual Disturbance (PDist) is another new product making its debut with the LF 2023 Update. PDist is designed to provide a second "draft" of landscape change information and will have multiple extent releases throughout 2024:

• Conterminous United States (CONUS) – by GeoArea
• Alaska (AK)
• Hawaii (HI)
• Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (PRVI)

PDist includes disturbance events for FY2023 from regional sources obtained in November 2023. Additionally, similar to annual disturbance products in past versions, PDist includes results from LANDFIRE satellite change detection and image-based severity. A complete list of data contributors can be found here: LANDFIRE Program: Contribute Data - Previous Contributions (usgs.gov).

The PDist product featured in the LF 2023 Update (named PDist23) will be used to update the Vegetation, Fuel (including Fuel Disturbance), and Fire Regime suite of products included in releases throughout the rest of 2024.

The Final Annual Disturbance (Dist) product is the "final" draft of Annual Disturbance data for a give version. The Annual Disturbance product included in the LF 2023 Update (named Dist23) releases beginning in the fall of 2024. Compared to PDist23, Dist23 includes additional fires and disturbance events for FY2023, these events were harvested from a second "pull" of the national online sources in June 2024.

• The Public Events Geodatabase for LF 2023 releases in late 2024 and will include events captured from this second "pull".
• The events harvested from the second "pull" will not be incorporated into the production of Fuel Disturbance (FDist23) and other Fuel, Vegetation, and Fire Regime products for the LF 2023 Update. These events will be included in the next version (coming in 2025).