The spatial and temporal distribution of crop residue burning in the contiguous United States
Abstract
Burning crop residue before and/or after harvest is a common farming practice however; there is no baseline estimate for cropland burned area in the contiguous U.S. (CONUS). We present the results of a study, using five years of remotely sensed satellite data to map the location and areal extent of crop residue burning in the CONUS. Our burned area approach combines 500 m Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) data, with 1 km MODIS active fire counts calibrated using coincident high resolution satellite data to generate area estimates. Our results show that cropland burning is an extensive and recurring annual event in several states in the CONUS. On average, 1,239,000 ha of croplands burn annually, which is equivalent to 43% of the annual average area of wildland fires in the U.S., as reported by the United States Forest Service for the same period. Several states experience high levels (>30,000 ha yr(-1)) of crop residue burning, including Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington. Validation with high resolution burn scar imagery and GPS data collected during targeted field campaigns showed a moderate to high-level accuracy for our burned area estimates, ranging from 78 to 90%. Our approach provides a more consistent methodology for quantifying cropland burned area at regional scales than the previously available U.S. national and state-level statistics on crop residue burning.
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Human activities and cultural drivers provide ignitions that substantially alter the distribution of fire across the United States, with examples including road networks, the wildland-urban interface, and agricultural-forest boundaries.
“Increased wildfires can follow road networks (36), the wildland–urban interface (13), and boundaries between agricultural and forested areas (37), highlighting just a few examples of how human activities and cultural drivers provide ignitions that substantially change the distribution of fire across the United States (38).”
From Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States (2017) · cites this paper as [37]
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Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States
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- Authors
- McCarty, J. L., Korontzi, S., Justice, C. O., & Loboda, T.
- Affiliations
- University of Louisville (US)
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Corresponding author
- McCarty, Jessica L.
- Venue
- Science of The Total Environment
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2009-10
- Volume
- 407
- Issue
- 21
- Pages
- 5701-5712
- ISSN
- 0048-9697 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1979215830
- Cited by
- 156
- References
- 50
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 3.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Science of The Total Environment (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy
- Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment
- Oregon Wheat Commission
- Natural Resources Conservation Service
- National Agricultural Statistics Service
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Fire effects on ecosystems
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Remote Sensing in Agriculture
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Atmospheric aerosols and clouds
- Keywords
- crop residue burning, cropland fires, burned area estimation, fire mapping, spatiotemporal variation, contiguous United States
- MeSH terms
- Environmental Pollution, Fires, United States, Satellite Communications, Crops, Agricultural, Geographic Information Systems
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