ALGEBA v1.0: A 42-year Landsat burned-area dataset for Algeria (1984–2025)

We present ALGEBA (ALGEria Burned Area), a national-scale 30-m resolution burned-area dataset covering all fire-prone regions of Algeria from 1984 to 2025. Southern arid and desert areas with negligible fuel availability are excluded. The dataset was derived from the Landsat 4–9 Collection 2 Level-2 Surface Reflectance Tier 1 archive, using the Burned Area Cartography Tool v1.7 (Roteta et al., 2021).

Over 42 years, ALGEBA maps a cumulative burned area of 2.60 million hectares.

File contents

One GeoPackage (.gpkg) file with 42 polygon layers, one per year (1984–2025).

• Format: OGC GeoPackage (.gpkg) 
• Geometry: Polygon
• Resolution: 30 m
• CRS: EPSG 4326 — WGS 84
• Geographical coverage: Mediterranean Algeria (North Africa)
• Bounding box: 2.22° W, 33.91° N, 8.68° E, 37.09° N.
• Layer naming: ALGEBA_v1_0_YYYY (e.g., ALGEBA_v1_0_1984 … ALGEBA_v1_0_2025)

Attributes

• detec_year: Detection year of burned patch (YYYY)
• detec_date: Landsat-based detection date (proxy for actual burning date; MM/DD/YYYY) 
• DOY: Detection day of the year (1–366)
• area_ha: Burned patch size in hectares

Validation summary

Spatial accuracy was assessed against 10-m Sentinel-2 reference data generated for 18 validation sites (20 × 20 km) in the reference years 2017 and 2021, following the CEOS-WGCV Land Product Validation stage-1 protocol:

Year	Commission error	Omission error	Dice coefficient	Relative bias
2017	8.32%	11.49%	90.07%	−3.45%
2021	7.74%	6.53%	92.86%	1.32%

Temporal reporting accuracy, assessed against MODIS (MCD14ML, 2001–2011) and VIIRS (VNP14IMGTDL, 2012–2025) active fires, yielded a median reporting delay of 26 days, with 57% of patches detected within 30 days and 82.5% within two months of the active-fire detection date.