Assessing Fire Effects in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Using Burn Ratios and Red-edge Spectral Indices

Keywords: Fire, Remote Sensing, Burn Ratios
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 27

Abstract

Burn severity is commonly assessed using Burn Ratios and field measurements to provide land managers with estimates on the degree of burning in an area. However, less commonly studied is the ability of spectral indices and Burn Ratios to estimate field measured fire effects. Past research has shown low correlations between fire effects and Landsat derived Burn Ratios, but with the launch of the Sentinel-2 constellation more spectral bands with finer spatial resolutions have become available. This poster explores the use of several red-edge based indices and Burn Ratios along side more ‘traditional’ spectral indices for predicting fire effects measured from the Maple and Berry fires in Wyoming, USA. The fire effects include ash depth, char depth, postfire dead lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta; PICO) density/stumps, mean basal diameter, cone density on dead postfire trees, coarse wood percent cover/volume/mass, percent cover ghost logs, and initial regeneration postfire PICO/aspen density. All-possible-models regression was used to determine the best models for estimating each fire effect. Models with satisfactory R2 values were constructed for postfire dead PICO stumps (0.663), coarse wood percent cover (0.691), coarse wood volume (0.833), coarse wood mass (0.838), ash depth (0.636) and percent cover ghost logs (0.717). Red-edge based indices were included in all of the satisfactory models, which shows that the red-edge bands may be useful for measuring fire effects.