Post-Fire Vegetation Regrowth Detection in the Deiva Marina Region (Liguria-Italy) Using Landsat TM and ETM+ Data

Obtaining quantitative information about the recovery of fire affected ecosystems is of utmost importance from the management and decision-making point of view. Nowadays the concern about natural environment protection and recovery is much greater than in the past. However, the resources and tools available for its management are still not sufficient. Thus, attention and precision is needed when decisions must be taken. Quantitative estimates on how the vegetation is recovering after a fire can be of help for evaluating the necessity of human intervention on the fire-affected ecosystem, and their importance will grow as the problem of forest fires, climate change and desertification increases. This article performs a comparison of methods to extract quantitative estimates of vegetation cover regrowth with Landsat TM and ETM+ data in an area that burned during the summer of 1998 in the Liguria region (Italy). In order to eliminate possible sources of error, a thorough pre-processing was carried out, including a careful geometric correction (reaching RMSE lower than 0.3 pixels), a topographic correction by means of a constrained Minnaert model and a combination of absolute and relative atmospheric correction methods. Pseudo Invariant Features (PIF) were identified by implementing an automated selection method based in temporal Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which has been called multi-Temporal n-Dimensional Principal Component Analysis (mT-nD-PCA).

SOLANS VILA Jose Pablo;  BARBOSA FERREIRA Paulo; 

2010-01-01

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

JRC49089

0304-3800,   

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/503306/description#description,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC49089,   

10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2009.03.011,