Monitoring fire-affected areas using Thematic Mapper data

Abstract

In this paper three methods for updating inventories of burned areas have been presented and examined. They include Multitemporal Principal Component Analysis (MPCA), Change Vector Analysis (CVA) and Multitemporal NDVI Classification (MNC). First, 11 Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) images of a forest area were radiometrically corrected to derive a multitemporal series of intercomparable images for each spring from 1984 to 1994. Then, in order to check the feasibility of the three approaches, they were used for mapping fire burns that occurred during 1992. The various procedures yielded different maps of burned areas; the MNC method seemed to be more reliable than the others, because it merges spectral data corresponding not only to 1992 (pre-fire) and 1993 (post-fire) but also to 1994 (the second year after the fires), which is key in the vegetation regeneration. Finally, this methodology was automated to yield an inventory of burned areas for each year during the period of study.