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The relationship of field burn severity measures to satellite-derived Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC) maps
Hudak, A.; Robichaud, P.; Jain, T.; Morgan, P.; Stone, C.; Clark, J. 2004.
The relationship of field burn severity measures to satellite-derived Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC) maps.
In: Remote Sensing for Field Users, Proceedings of the Tenth Forest Service Remote Sensing Applications Conference,
Salt Lake City, Utah, April 5-9, 2004. CD-ROM. 9 p.
Keywords: Fire effects, Cooney Ridge Fire, Black Mountain Two Fire, SPOT, Landsat
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Abstract:
Preliminary results are presented from ongoing research on spatial variability of fire effects on soils and vegetation
from the Black Mountain Two and Cooney Ridge wildfires, which burned in western Montana during the 2003 fire
season. Extensive field fractional cover data were sampled to assess the efficacy of quantitative satellite image-derived
indicators of burn severity. The objective of this study was to compare the field burn severity measures to the digital
numbers used to produce Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC) maps. Canopy density was the field variable
most highly correlated to BARC data derived from either SPOT Multispectral (XS) or Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)
imagery. Among the other field variables, old litter depth and duff depth correlated better with the satellite data than
did old litter cover. Ash cover correlated most poorly. Old litter cover correlated better with the satellite data than did
exposed mineral soil or rock cover, but combining the mineral soil and rock cover fractions into a single inorganic
cover fraction improved the correlation to a comparable level. Most field variables, with the notable exception of ash,
tended to vary more at low and moderate severity sites than at high severity sites. Semivariograms of the field variables
revealed spatial autocorrelation across the spatial scales sampled (2 – 130 m), which the 20 m or 30 m resolution
satellite imagery only weakly detected. Future analyses will be broadened to quantify burn severity characteristics in
other forest types and to consider erosion processes, such as soil water infiltration following fire.
Moscow FSL publication no. 2004s
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