Fire behavior within and across various landscapes results in a variety of spatial patterns of burn severity. This results in a variety of regeneration environments leading to greater landscape heterogeneity and species diversity in ecosystems. Mapping the spatial patterns of burn severity is a process that is used to help understand these landscape dynamics. A Joint Fire Science supported project has been initiated to validate procedures used for mapping landscape level burn severity patterns of extended change using remotely sensed data. Field observations of ecosystem response to fire are being used to define burn severity and correlate with the radiometric responses resulting from the differencing of pre-burn satellite data with post-burn satellite data. Analysis are underway to determine how broadly suitable and consistent the approach is across a variety of ecosystems. To date data for fourteen fires have been collected over a variety of different ecosystems. This paper contrast initial results attained within these different ecosystems from this validation study on mappings of burn severity.