Dataset Card for CEMS Burn Scar

Dataset Summary

This dataset provides Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) imagery of burn scars and associated masks for the years 2020-2024, primarily over Europe, with some non-European cases (e.g., Mexico, Guatemala). It includes 439 high-quality 512x512 scenes, designed for training geospatial machine learning models for burn scar segmentation. The dataset follows the same principles and structure as the HLS Burn Scars dataset, ensuring compatibility and consistency.

Dataset Structure

TIFF Metadata

Each TIFF file is a 512x512 pixel scene. Scenes contain eight bands, and masks have one band. Satellite scenes have bands in Digital Numbers (DN), as per Sentinel-Hub documentation (https://docs.sentinel-hub.com/api/latest/data/hls/#units). $DN = 10000 \times REFLECTANCE$

All images contain metadata about the event, including the title corresponding to the activation in CEMS, the date range and the area.

Band Order

For scenes:

Channel	Name	HLS S30 Band number
1	Blue	B02
2	Green	B03
3	Red	B04
4	NIR	B8A
5	SWIR 1	B11
6	SWIR 2	B12
7	dataMask	-
8	QA	-

Class Distribution

Masks are a single band with values:

1: Burn scar
0: Not burned

Label	Representation
Burn Scar	10 %
Not burned	90 %

Data Splits

The 439 files are randomly split into training (70%), validation (12%), and test (18%) directories, each containing masks, scenes, and index files.

Dataset Creation

Following the principles of the HLS Burn Scars dataset, we developed a sophisticated pipeline to transform Copernicus EMS (CEMS) burn scar geometries into high-quality image-label pairs. Key steps include:

Extracting geometries from CEMS Rapid Mapping data and tiling into a UTM grid (512x512 at 30m resolution).
Applying spatio-temporal clustering to group scars within a 30-day window, resolving overlaps and minimizing false negatives.
Downloading HLS imagery via Sentinel-Hub, filtering out tiles with excessive cloud cover or invalid pixels. This process ensures robust data for training geospatial models.

Source Data

Imagery is sourced from HLS V2 via Sentinel-Hub, accessible at https://www.sentinel-hub.com/. A full description of HLS is available at https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/documents/1698/HLS_User_Guide_V2.pdf. Burn scar geometries are from CEMS Rapid Mapping (2020-2024), covering ~200 fire events, available at https://mapping.emergency.copernicus.eu/.

Citation

If this dataset supports your research, please cite CEMS Burn Scars in your publications. Example BibTeX entry:

@dataset{cems_burnscars,
  author       = {Jose Moreno Ortega},
  title        = {CEMS BurnScars},
  year         = {2025},
  month        = {may},
  day          = {4},
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.15335977},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15335977}
}