Measuring short-term post-fire forest recovery across a burn severity gradient in a mixed pine-oak forest using multi-sensor remote sensing techniques

• Published in: Remote sensing of environment Vol. 210; no. C; pp. 282 - 296
• Main Authors: Meng, Ran, Wu, Jin, Zhao, Feng, Cook, Bruce D., Hanavan, Ryan P., Serbin, Shawn P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Elsevier Inc 01.06.2018; Elsevier BV; Elsevier
• Subjects: Airborne sensing; BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES; Burn severity; burning; Canopies; canopy; Carbon cycle; Coniferous forests; Detection; Ecological effects; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Fire adaptive strategies; Fire effects; Forest & brush fires; Forest composition and structure; forest dynamics; Forest ecosystems; Forest fires; Forest management; Forests; Hyperspectral data; image analysis; Lidar; Measurement; multispectral imagery; Oak; OTHER INSTRUMENTATION; Pine; Pine trees; Pinus; Quercus; Recovery; Remote monitoring; Remote sensing; Remote sensing systems; Remote sensing techniques; Remote sensors; Satellite imagery; satellites; Sensing techniques; Species-specific post-fire responses; Spectroscopy; tree mortality; Trees; Understory; Vegetation classification; WorldView-2; Hyperspectral data; Burn severity; Fire adaptive strategies; Species-specific post-fire responses; Forest composition and structure; WorldView-2; Vegetation classification
• ISSN: 0034-4257; 1879-0704
• DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2018.03.019

Understanding post-fire forest recovery is pivotal to the study of forest dynamics and global carbon cycle. Field-based studies indicated a convex response of forest recovery rate to burn severity at the individual tree level, related with fire-induced tree mortality; however, these findings were constrained in spatial/temporal extents, while not detectable by traditional optical remote sensing studies, largely attributing to the contaminated effect from understory recovery. Here, we examined whether the combined use of multi-sensor remote sensing techniques (i.e., 1 m simultaneous airborne imaging spectroscopy and LiDAR and 2 m satellite multi-spectral imagery) to separate canopy recovery from understory recovery would enable to quantify post-fire forest recovery rate spanning a large gradient in burn severity over large-scales. Our study was conducted in a mixed pine-oak forest in Long Island, NY, three years after a top-killing fire. Our studies remotely detected an initial increase and then decline of forest recovery rate to burn severity across the burned area, with a maximum canopy area-based recovery rate of 10% per year at moderate forest burn severity class. More intriguingly, such remotely detected convex relationships also held at species level, with pine trees being more resilient to high burn severity and having a higher maximum recovery rate (12% per year) than oak trees (4% per year). These results are one of the first quantitative evidences showing the effects of fire adaptive strategies on post-fire forest recovery, derived from relatively large spatial-temporal scales. Our study thus provides the methodological advance to link multi-sensor remote sensing techniques to monitor forest dynamics in a spatially explicit manner over large-scales, with important implications for fire-related forest management and constraining/benchmarking fire effect schemes in ecological process models. •Novel remote sensing advances quantitations of post-fire forest recovery.•A convex relationship exists between forest recovery rate and burn severity.•The detected convex relationship holds at species level.•Studying species-specific post-fire responses to different levels of burn severity