Advances in Remote Sensing of Wildland Fires
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2011) | Viewed by 69915
Special Issue Editor
Interests: forest fires; land-use/land-cover mapping; pre-fire planning and post-fire assessment; remote sensing; GIS; forest management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
To introduce new policies that would reduce fire risk and/or its impacts, it is necessary to have a good understanding of how fire affects the structure and functioning of ecosystems. To achieve these goals a thorough understanding is required of not only the prefire distribution of the specific resource features, conditions and characteristics, but what is also required is the collection of post-fire data (e.g. biomass, burn severity, species regeneration, vegetation-type succession) in order to detect and specify environmental changes and trends.
Assessment and analysis of these changes and trends at the local scale are increasingly considered a critical aspect of ecosystem research, since fire plays a crucial role in vegetation composition, biodiversity, soil erosion, and the hydrological cycle. Also at the global scale, they are believed to be sensitive indicators of the impact of changes in the global environment. Whether these changes are mainly caused by land use change or climate warming, greater efforts are demanded to manage wildland fires at different temporal and spatial scales.
Remotely sensed data are used in all the three phases of a fire management program, namely, pre-fire planning, fire detection and monitoring, and post-fire impact assessment. Since the initiation of the Landsat satellite program, several projects have been conducted to test the potential efficacy and reliability of satellite data in collecting information related to forest fire management. However, during the last decade, the range of applications has increased significantly as a result of the following:
- an increase in the number of airborne and satellite sensors with different characteristics suitable for studying aspects of fire, some of which have been designed specifically for fire monitoring;
- improvement of our understanding of the role of fire in ecosystems functioning;
- progress in computer technology (hardware, software);
- development of new advanced digital image analysis techniques; and
- improved access to and availability of satellite data and derived products.
This special issue aims to focus on remote sensing applications that make use of new sensors and/or advanced image analysis techniques in order to provide accurate information related to fire management.
Dr. Ioannis Gitas
Guest Editor
Keywords
- fuel mapping
- fire risk
- fire danger
- active fire mapping
- biomass burning
- burned area mapping
- burn severity
- post-fire forest regeneration
- vegetation succession monitoring
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