Abstract
The ability to document the frequency, extent, and severity of fires in wetlands, as well as the dynamics of post-fire wetland land cover, informs fire and wetland science, resource management, and ecosystem protection. Available information on Everglades burn history has been based on field data collection methods that evolved through time and differ by land management unit. Our objectives were to (1) design and test broadly applicable and repeatable metrics of not only fire scar delineation but also post-fire land cover dynamics through exhaustive use of the Landsat satellite data archives, and then (2) explore how those metrics relate to various hydrologic and anthropogenic factors that may influence post-fire land cover dynamics. Visual interpretation of every Landsat scene collected over the study region during the study time frame produced a new, detailed database of burn scars greater than 1.6 ha in size in the Water Conservation Areas and post-fire land cover dynamics for Everglades National Park fires greater than 1.6 ha in area. Median burn areas were compared across several landscape units of the Greater Everglades and found to differ as a function of administrative unit and fire history. Some burned areas transitioned to open water, exhibiting water depths and dynamics that support transition mechanisms proposed in the literature. Classification tree techniques showed that time to green-up and return to pre-burn character were largely explained by fire management practices and hydrology. Broadly applicable as they use data from the global, nearly 30-year-old Landsat archive, these methods for documenting wetland burn extent and post-fire land cover change enable cost-effective collection of new data on wetland fire ecology and independent assessment of fire management practice effectiveness.
Highlights
Has been compiled from narrative reports, paper sketch maps, and more recently, fieldbased traces of fire scars using GPS
Because of the challenges associated with remote delineation of fire scars and post-fire land cover dynamics tracking in complex, dynamic, sub-tropical wetlands like those of the Everglades, our objectives in this study were to (1) design and test broadly applicable and repeatable metrics of fire scar delineation and post-fire land cover dynamics through exhaustive use of the Landsat satellite data archive, and (2) explore how those metrics relate to various hydrologic and anthropogenic factors that may influence post-fire land cover dynamics
The Water Conservation Areas (WCAs) have peat soils ranging from 1 m to 3 m in depth (Scheidt and Kalla 2007) and are generally long-hydroperiod Cladium jamaicense Crantz flat marshes with ridge and slough microtopography that include interspersed willow heads dominated by Salix caroliniana Michx.; bayheads dominated by Magnolia virginiana L., Ilex cassine L., and Persea borbonia (L.) Spreng.; and subtropical hardwood tree islands that support species needing drier conditions, such as Lysiloma latisiliquum (L.) Benth., Quercus virginiana Mill., and Annona glabra L., among others (Zahina 1998, US Fish and Wildlife Service 1999, Lodge 2005)
Summary
Wetland Fire Scar Monitoring and analySiS USing archival landSat data For the evergladeS. Classification tree techniques showed that time to green-up and return to pre-burn character were largely explained by fire management practices and hydrology Applicable as they use data from the global, nearly 30year-old Landsat archive, these methods for documenting wetland burn extent and postfire land cover change enable cost-effective collection of new data on wetland fire ecology and independent assessment of fire management practice effectiveness. On 21 April 2008, the US Geological Survey (USGS) announced that it would begin providing all archived Landsat scenes at no charge to users This action created the opportunities to develop new approaches to landscape dynamics monitoring that may rely on partially cloudy imagery (i.e., processing at the individual pixel level if necessary), rather than restricting investigations to the rare dates when completely clear images are available. Because of the challenges associated with remote delineation of fire scars and post-fire land cover dynamics tracking in complex, dynamic, sub-tropical wetlands like those of the Everglades, our objectives in this study were to (1) design and test broadly applicable and repeatable metrics of fire scar delineation and post-fire land cover dynamics through exhaustive use of the Landsat satellite data archive, and (2) explore how those metrics relate to various hydrologic and anthropogenic factors that may influence post-fire land cover dynamics
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