ISSN 2070-7401 (Print), ISSN 2411-0280 (Online)
Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa
CURRENT PROBLEMS IN REMOTE SENSING OF THE EARTH FROM SPACE

  

Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa, 2017, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 84-97

Remote monitoring of vegetation regeneration dynamics on burnt areas of Mari Zavolzhje forests

O.N. Vorobev 1 , E.A. Kurbanov 1 
1 Volga State University of Technology, Center of Sustainable Forest Management and Remote Sensing, Yoshkar-Ola, Russia
Accepted: 29.03.2017
DOI: 10.21046/2070-7401-2017-14-2-84-97
Forest fires are the main disturbance factor for natural ecosystems, especially in boreal forests. Monitoring of the regeneration dynamics of vegetation cover in the post-fire period of ecosystem recovery is crucial for both estimation of forest stands and forest management. In this study, on the example of burnt areas of 2010 wildfires in Kuyarski forest district of Mari Zavolzhje forests we estimated the post-fire dynamics of different classes of vegetation cover between 2011−2016 years by use of Landsat and Canopus-B time series satellite images. To validate the newly obtained thematic maps we used 80 test sites with independent field data, as well as Canopus-B high spatial resolution images. For the analysis of the satellite images we referred to Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Tasseled Cap transformation. The research revealed that in the post-fire period, the area of thematic classes “Reforestation of the middle and low density” has maximum cover (44%) on the investigated burnt area. On the burnt areas of 2010, there is an active ongoing process of grass overgrowing (up to 20%), also there are thematic classes of deadwood (15%) and open spaces (10%). The overall unsupervised classification accuracy is more than 70% which shows high degree of consistency between the thematic map and the ground truth data. The results indicate that there is mostly natural regeneration of tree species pattern corresponding to the pre-fire condition. Forest plantations cover only 2% of the overall burnt area. By 2016, the NDVI parameters of young vegetation cover had recovered to the pre-fire level as well. The research results can be employed in long-term succession monitoring on the lands disturbed by fire and management plan development for the reforestation activities in Mari Zavolzhje.

Keywords: remote sensing, Landsat, Canopus-B, NDVI, forest burnt areas, image classification, thematic mapping, vegetation cover
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