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Using High Spatial Resolution Satellite Imagery to Map Forest Burn Severity Across Spatial Scales in a Pine Barrens EcosystemAs a primary disturbance agent, fire significantly influences local processes and services of forest ecosystems. Although a variety of remote sensing based approaches have been developed and applied to Landsat mission imagery to infer burn severity at 30 m spatial resolution, forest burn severity have still been seldom assessed at fine spatial scales (less than or equal to 5 m) from very-high-resolution (VHR) data. We assessed a 432 ha forest fire that occurred in April 2012 on Long Island, New York, within the Pine Barrens region, a unique but imperiled fire-dependent ecosystem in the northeastern United States. The mapping of forest burn severity was explored here at fine spatial scales, for the first time using remotely sensed spectral indices and a set of Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis (MESMA) fraction images from bi-temporal - pre- and post-fire event - WorldView-2 (WV-2) imagery at 2 m spatial resolution. We first evaluated our approach using 1 m by 1 m validation points at the sub-crown scale per severity class (i.e. unburned, low, moderate, and high severity) from the post-fire 0.10 m color aerial ortho-photos; then, we validated the burn severity mapping of geo-referenced dominant tree crowns (crown scale) and 15 m by 15 m fixed-area plots (inter-crown scale) with the post-fire 0.10 m aerial ortho-photos and measured crown information of twenty forest inventory plots. Our approach can accurately assess forest burn severity at the sub-crown (overall accuracy is 84% with a Kappa value of 0.77), crown (overall accuracy is 82% with a Kappa value of 0.76), and inter-crown scales (89% of the variation in estimated burn severity ratings (i.e. Geo-Composite Burn Index (CBI)). This work highlights that forest burn severity mapping from VHR data can capture heterogeneous fire patterns at fine spatial scales over the large spatial extents. This is important since most ecological processes associated with fire effects vary at the less than 30 m scale and VHR approaches could significantly advance our ability to characterize fire effects on forest ecosystems.
Document ID
20170005569
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Reprint (Version printed in journal)
Authors
Meng, Ran
(Brookhaven National Lab. Upton, NY, United States)
Wu, Jin
(Brookhaven National Lab. Upton, NY, United States)
Schwager, Kathy L.
(Brookhaven National Lab. Upton, NY, United States)
Zhao, Feng
(Maryland Univ. College Park, MD, United States)
Dennison, Philip E.
(Utah Univ. Salt Lake City, UT, United States)
Cook, Bruce D.
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Brewster, Kristen
(State Univ. of New York Brockport, NY, United States)
Green, Timothy M.
(Brookhaven National Lab. Upton, NY, United States)
Serbin, Shawn P.
(Brookhaven National Lab. Upton, NY, United States)
Date Acquired
June 14, 2017
Publication Date
January 21, 2017
Publication Information
Publication: Remote Sensing of Environment
Publisher: Elsevier
Volume: 191
ISSN: 0034-4257
e-ISSN: 1879-0704
Subject Category
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Report/Patent Number
GSFC-E-DAA-TN43393
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: DE-SC00112704
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other

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