Abstract
Disturbance events, such as fire, have a major impact on boreal forest dynamics, succession, and the global carbon cycle. Methods using satellite imagery are well established for detecting forest fires in real time and mapping the burned area (fire scars) within one year of the fire. This paper focuses on the detection of older fire disturbance-regeneration patterns in the boreal forests of Canada. Previous work found that shortwave-infrared image segmentation proved particularly good at creating uniform regions that were easy to associate with fire scars. Our findings suggest it is possible to detect fire scars up to ten years old using SPOT-VEGETATION data from a single year and that the use of a vegetation index based on near- and shortwave-infrared reflectance is critical to this success. We demonstrate how the use of short-term multitemporal imagery can enhance segmentation results and present a threshold-based procedure for a posteriori identification of fire scar segments. The resulting fire scar probability map showed a good correspondence with records of fire scars mapped by the Canadian Forest Service for 1980-1992 and "hot spots" from the FireM3 Information System for 1994-1998.
Highlights
Disturbance events, such as fire, have a major impact on boreal forest dynamics, succession and the global carbon cycle
Segmentations of SWIR, Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and NDSWIR were compared with the Large Fire Database (LFDB) fire scar polygons and the FireM3 fire hotspot points
Monitoring the spatial and temporal dynamics of forest fires is vital for assessing the impacts of global environmental change
Summary
Disturbance events, such as fire, have a major impact on boreal forest dynamics, succession and the global carbon cycle. Crown fires in close succession or extending over large areas may mean the forest in a given area is not able to regenerate due to lack of seed trees and sites for germination. This is evident in Siberia, where areas dominated by lichens can be observed. Pines cannot regenerate without a new ground fire but the fuel load of lichens is too sparse for ground fire to occur so the lichen patches remain [2] This impoverishment of forests by fire has been suggested as the cause of the belt of treeless areas in the taiga-tundra ecotone in northern Eurasia [8]
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