Systematic monitoring of burned areas is needed by the global change research community as an input to biogeochemical models and to understand and model how fire regimes are likely to change as a function of climate, population dynamics, and land use change. • Southern Africa has the most extensive biomass burning globally and is undergoing rapid social and economic change. Majority of fires are lit by people primarily for land management. • Development of regional multi-year burned area products using MODIS data. • An applications component is included following a guiding GOFC-GOLD principle that the user community play an active role in undertaking product assessment and testing of pre-operational algorithms. • The project collaborators are located at case study sites throughout southern Africa. Multitemporal Landsat ETM+ data acquired over the case study sites used to validate the MODIS burned area products. • Evaluate LCLUC hypotheses that explore the interplay between physical and human variables on fire size and timing at the regional scale.