Abstract
Quantifying post-fire effects in a forested landscape is important to ascertain burn severity, ecosystem recovery and post-fire hazard assessments and mitigation planning. Reporting of such post-fire effects assumes significance in fire-prone countries such as USA, Australia, Spain, Greece and Portugal where prescribed burns are routinely carried out. This paper describes the use of Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) to estimate and map change in the forest understorey following a prescribed burn. Eighteen descriptive metrics are derived from bi-temporal TLS which are used to analyse and visualise change in a control and fire-altered plot. Metrics derived are Above Ground Height-based (AGH) percentiles and heights, point count and mean intensity. Metrics such as AGH50change, mean AGHchange and point countchange are sensitive enough to detect subtle fire-induced change (28%–52%) whilst observing little or no change in the control plot (0–4%). A qualitative examination with field measurements of the spatial distribution of burnt areas and percentage area burnt also show similar patterns. This study is novel in that it examines the behaviour of TLS metrics for estimating and mapping fire induced change in understorey structure in a single-scan mode with a minimal fixed reference system. Further, the TLS-derived metrics can be used to produce high resolution maps of change in the understorey landscape.
Highlights
Ecological systems are dynamic and disturbance is an important factor for change
This study explores the use of terrestrial LiDAR technology to produce estimates of understorey forest change which is accurate, repeatable, robust and sensitive to the low intensity nature of a prescribed burn and can be used by the land management agencies to supplement qualitative assessments of change in response to prescribed burns
They were assessed for their similarity in mapping the spatial distribution of change and percentage area burnt based on visual field assessments
Summary
Ecological systems are dynamic and disturbance is an important factor for change. Fire is an agent of environmental change globally at various spatial and temporal scales determining land use, productivity, biodiversity and has impacts on hydrologic, biogeochemical and atmospheric processes [1]. Fires occur over the majority of the Australian landscape and in most vegetation types [2], and Australian dry sclerophyll forests are amongst the more fire-prone forest communities in the world [3] Land managers in such fire-prone countries mitigate the threat posed by catastrophic wildfires using prescribed burning (fuel reduction). These low intensity burns involve the deliberate application of fire to forest fuels under specified conditions in order to achieve well-defined management goals [4]. These goals include reduction of wildfire hazard, protecting biodiversity and protecting infrastructures at the urban interface [5]
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