Fire is a common circumstance in the world. It causes direct casualties and economic losses, and also brings severe negative influences on the atmospheric environment. In the background of climate warming and rising population, it is important to understand the fire responses regarding the spatio-temporal changes. Thus, a long-term change analysis of fires is needed in China. We use the remote sensed MOD14A1/MYD14A1 fire products to analyze the seasonal variations and long-term trends, based on five main land cover types (forest, cropland, grassland, savannas and urban areas). The fires are found to have clear seasonal variations; there are more fires in spring and autumn in vegetated lands, which are related to the amount of dry biomass and temperature. The fire numbers have significantly increased during the study period, especially from spring to autumn, and those have decreased in winter. The long-term fire trends are different when delineated into different land cover types. There are significant increasing fire trends in grasslands and croplands in North, East and Northeast China during the study period. The urban fires also show increasing trends. On the contrary, there are significant decreasing fire trends in forests and savannas in South China where it is most densely vegetated. This study provides an overall analysis of the spatio-temporal fire changes from satellite products, and it may help to understand the fire risk in the changing climate for a better risk management.

Remote sensing imageries processed through empirical and deterministic approaches help predict multiple agronomic traits throughout the growing season. Accurate identification of cotton crop from remotely sensed imageries is a significant task in precision agriculture. This study aims to utilize a deep learning-based framework for cotton crop field identification with Gaofen-1 (GF-1) high-resolution (16 m) imageries in Wei-Ku region, China. An optimized model for the pixel-wise multidimensional densely connected convolutional neural network (DenseNet) was used. Four widely-used classic convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including ResNet, VGG, SegNet, and DeepLab v3+, were also used for accuracy assessment. The results infer that DenseNet can identify cotton crop features within a relatively shorter time about 5 h for training convergence. The model performance was examined by multiple indicators (P, F1, R, and mIou) produced through the confusion matrix, and the derived cotton fields were then visualized. The DenseNet model has illustrated considerable improvements in comparison with the preceding mainstream models. The results showed that the retrieval precision was 0.948, F1 score was 0.953, and mIou was 0.911. Furthermore, its performance is relatively better in discriminating cotton crop fields’ fine structures when clouds, mountain shadows, and urban built up.