Abstract: Forest fires are one of the most important disturbances of terrestrial ecosystems, atmospheric environment and global change. Traditional fire statistical data were based on field investigation which is difficult to collect and spatialize. The development of remote sensing technology provides a new method for fire study. This paper aims to summarize the relevant studies of burned area based on remote sensing, including data development and data application, and bring up a prospect for future research. This paper firstly reviewed researches on the burned area from two aspects: 1) Existing data product set of burned area and its development. Firstly, the existed burned area data were introduced from several aspects, such as name of dataset, remote sensing data source, coverage, time span, spatial resolution and time resolution. Secondly, algorithms for mapping burned area were compared, including thermal anomaly based method, Spectralanomaly based method, and a combination of them. When fire happens, there are obvious temperature anomaly characteristics which are the base of active fire detection. There are also obvious changes in the vegetation dynamics pre- and post-fire, which are the base of mapping burned area. Most algorithms for mapping burned area only consider one characteristic (temperature anomaly or vegetation dynamics) in mapping burned area, which could cause a relative high error. Thirdly, accuracy of current burned area products was summarized from omission errors, commission errors and overall accuracy. 2) The applications of burned area products in fire hazard assessment, fire emissions and dynamic global vegetation model are reviewed. Finally, the paper points out, the future remote sensing based burned area study may include three aspects: 1) Long-term series burned area data are needed for understanding the long-term fire, climate and vegetation interaction. 2) High accuracy burned area products are needed in regional fire study. 3) New outputs such as fire energy, fire temperature and fire size are expected by different end-users which can expand the scope of the application of burned area data.

Key words: burned area, remote sensing, ecological disturbance, forest fire