Assessing Burned Area Detection in Indonesia Using the Stacking Ensemble Neural Network (SENN): A Comparative Analysis of C- and L-Band Performance

Burned area detection plays a critical role in assessing the impact of forest and land fires, particularly in Indonesia, where both peatland and non-peatland areas are increasingly affected. Optical remote sensing has been widely used for this task, but its effectiveness is limited by persistent cloud cover in tropical regions. A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers a cloud-independent alternative for burned area mapping. This study investigates the performance of a Stacking Ensemble Neural Network (SENN) model using polarimetric features derived from both C-band (Sentinel 1) and L-band (Advanced Land Observing Satellite—Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS-2/PALSAR-2)) data. The analysis covers three representative sites in Indonesia: peatland areas in (1) Rokan Hilir, (2) Merauke, and non-peatland areas in (3) Bima and Dompu. Validation is conducted using high-resolution PlanetScope imagery(Planet Labs PBC—San Francisco, California, United States). The results show that the SENN model consistently outperforms conventional artificial neural network (ANN) approaches across most evaluation metrics. L-band SAR data yields a superior performance to the C-band, particularly in peatland areas, with overall accuracy reaching 93–96% and precision between 92 and 100%. The method achieves 76% accuracy and 89% recall in non-peatland regions. Performance is lower in dry, hilly savanna landscapes. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the SENN, especially with L-band SAR, in improving burned area detection across diverse land types, supporting more reliable fire monitoring efforts in Indonesia.