Abstract
An important component in improving the quality of forests is to study the interference intensity of forest fires, in order to describe the intensity of the forest fire and the vegetation recovery, and to improve the monitoring ability of the dynamic change of the forest. Using a forest fire event in Bilahe, Inner Monglia in 2017 as a case study, this study extracted the burned area based on the BAIS2 index of Sentinel-2 data for 2016–2018. The leaf area index (LAI) and fractional vegetation cover (FVC), which are more suitable for monitoring vegetation dynamic changes of a burned area, were calculated by comparing the biophysical and spectral indices. The results showed that patterns of change of LAI and FVC of various land cover types were similar post-fire. The LAI and FVC of forest and grassland were high during the pre-fire and post-fire years. During the fire year, from the fire month (May) through the next 4 months (September), the order of areas of different fire severity in terms of values of LAI and FVC was: low > moderate > high severity. During the post fire year, LAI and FVC increased rapidly in areas of different fire severity, and the ranking of areas of different fire severity in terms of values LAI and FVC was consistent with the trend observed during the pre-fire year. The results of this study can improve the understanding of the mechanisms involved in post-fire vegetation change. By using quantitative inversion, the health trajectory of the ecosystem can be rapidly determined, and therefore this method can play an irreplaceable role in the realization of sustainable development in the study area. Therefore, it is of great scientific significance to quantitatively retrieve vegetation variables by remote sensing.
Highlights
Fires can influence the global carbon cycle and act as important disruptors of forest ecosystems by damaging large numbers of trees, changing tree species composition, reducing biomass and changing the surface landscape [1,2]
The specific objectives of the present study were to: (1) extract the burned area and classify the severity of the fire using the burned area index for Sentinel-2 (BAIS2) index [23], and to verify these results against the normalized burn index (NBR); (2) compare spectral indices with biophysical variables to identify biophysical variables that are more suitable for evaluating fire severity; (3) use biophysical indices to quantitatively measure vegetation changes of various land cover types in response to forest fires
The results showed that BAIS2 ranged from 0.73 to 1.23, similar to the results obtained by Filipponi [23], and the NBR ranged from −0.53 to 0
Summary
Fires can influence the global carbon cycle and act as important disruptors of forest ecosystems by damaging large numbers of trees, changing tree species composition, reducing biomass and changing the surface landscape [1,2]. The succession resulting from forest fires plays an important role in adjusting the structure of the plant community and maintaining species diversity, which is an indispensable driving force for the development of the forest ecosystem plant community [3]. The fire severity refers to the loss or decomposition of organic matter aboveground and belowground. Metrics for this parameter vary with the ecosystem. The traditional method of calculating the forest fire severity according to the specific investigation technical standard
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