Fire severity maps are an important tool for understanding fire effects on a landscape. The relative differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) is a commonly used severity index in California forests, and is typically divided into four categories: unchanged, low, moderate, and high.
Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States.
Comprehensive assessment of ecological change after fires have burned forests and rangelands is important if we are to understand, predict and measure fire effects. We highlight the challenges in effective assessment of fire and burn severity in the field and using both remote sensing and simulation models.
Bark beetle-caused tree mortality affects important forest ecosystem processes. Remote sensing methodologies that quantify live and dead basal area (BA) in bark beetle-affected forests can provide valuable information to forest managers and researchers.
High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuous maps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires.
Evaluating the influence of observed daily weather on observed fire-related effects (e.g. smoke production, carbon emissions and burn severity) often involves knowing exactly what day any given area has burned.
Effective wildfire management in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) depends on timely data on forest fuel loading to inform management decisions.
Biomass burning by wildland fires has significant ecological, social and economic impacts. Satellite remote sensing provides direct measurements of radiative energy released by the fire (i.e. fire intensity) and surrogate measures of ecological change due to the fire (i.e. fire or burn severity).
In response to climate change and other threatening processes there is renewed interest in the role of refugia and refuges. In bioregions that experience drought and fire, micro-refuges can play a vital role in ensuring the persistence of species.
We examined the effects of three early season (spring) prescribed fires on burn severity patterns of summer wildfires that occurred 1–3 years post- treatment in a mixed conifer forest in central Idaho. Wildfire and prescribed fire burn severities were estimated as the difference in normalized burn ratio (dNBR) using Landsat imagery.