Description
Hi firedpy team,
Great product! Thanks for making the algorithm reusable. I have a general feature request, and it seems that #33 from @admahood is one specific way to implement it.
As folks start using this algorithm to build event databases beyond the spatiotemporal scope of the original publication of the dataset (https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/datasets/nv935382p), it would be helpful to ensure that the unique identifiers of the events can be reproduced. For example, the currently published dataset goes through January of 2019 and covers CONUS, but rerunning the algorithm for just February of 2019 to present would (presumably) generate new unique IDs that overlap with the ones already published. That will make it more difficult to join datasets created with firedpy with other fire data (e.g., MTBS, the FRAP perimeters, FPA-FOD) if the FIRED unique identifiers change with each algorithm run.
One idea is to include some metadata associated with each event in the ID. The year, month, and MODIS tile seem like good candidates here, since those are the minimum units of time and space in which the MODIS burned area product are delivered. On second thought, since the algorithm could be based on products other than MODIS burned area, maybe Adam's approach to using the centroid coordinates and event start datetime makes more sense (though you could also include the datetime and centroid in the ID in addition to a random string for readability).
I suppose the short way of saying this is that I think this thought of Adam's might be more important than he gives himself credit for!