The record-breaking 2004 fire season burned approximately 6.6 million acres in Alaska, with over 2 million acres on National Wildlife Refuge Lands. This provided the opportunity to assess the application of the national Burn Severity Mapping project techniques on Refuge lands. The methodology was developed by the National Park Service and the US Geological Survey and has been used on National Parks in Alaska. The objectives of this project are to: 1) assess the relationship between Composite Burn Index (CBI) plot data and satellite-derived change in Normalized Burn Ration (dNBR); 2) determine if these relationships remain constant across other (later) LANDSAT scenes for the same fire, or between fires on the same scene; and 3) evaluate any systematic changes in these relationships across different vegetation communities within the boreal forest. 347 ground plots were sampled between June and August 2005. Preliminary results show the relationships between dNBR and CBI scores for the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge fires are consistently poor, in contrast to that found for the National Park fires.