Modeling carbon pools and fluxes at continental scales is critical for evaluating feedbacks in regional- and global-scale changes in climate and atmospheric chemistry.  Wildland fire is a major contributor to the dynamism of the North American carbon budget, and because current trends in climate change will likely result in drier North American climates with more frequent and severe fires, the magnitude of this contribution is likely to increase (IPCC 2001). Quantifying wildfire gaseous emissions and the relative apportionment of emitted carbonaceous gas species to the atmosphere is vital to narrowing the uncertainties associated with key questions concerning global climate change and atmospheric chemistry, as well as local and regional air quality. Continental scale emission estimates are currently calculated via the parameterization of a simple model, in which the total biomass combusted (and consequently the gases emitted) is determined through the simple multiplication of the area burned by the pre-fire fuel load and the proportion of fuel combusted within the fire. Consequently the assessment of the Area Burned, A, and the Combustion Completeness (b) are important aspects of fire-emissions research.

Assessment of The Area Burned. The Forest and Rangeland Measurements Lab has investigated several novel ways to evaluate the extent of burned area. Specifically, the lab has published several papers researching ways to monitor burned area in Southern African Savannahs and in North America Forests:

Smith A.M.S., Drake, N.A., Wooster, M.J., Hudak, A.T,. Holden, Z.A. and Gibbons C.J. 2007 Production of Landsat ETM+ Reference Imagery of Burned Areas within Southern African Savannahs: Comparison of Methods and Application to MODIS, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 28, 12, 2753-2775.. (PDF)

Holden, Z., Smith A.M.S., Morgan, P.,Rollins, M,G. and Gessler, P.E.,  2005, Evaluation of novel thermally enhanced spectral indices for mapping fire pereimeters and comparisons with fire atlas data, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 26 ,217, 4801-4808. (PDF)

Smith A.M.S., Wooster M.J., Powell, A.K. and Usher, D., 2002, Texture based feature extraction: application to burn scar detection in Earth Observation Imagery, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 23, 1733-1739 (PDF)

Ongoing research includes the assessment of the more promising techniques to multiple environments simultaneously, as most studies are restricted to only evaluating restricted methods to single study environments.

Evaluation of Vegetation Recovery. Recent research has seen the lab investigate whether remote measures of the fraction of char (shown above for the Jasper Fire, South Dakota) and green vegetation within burned area Landsat pixels acquired immediately post fire can be used to predict 1-yr post-fire measures of the ecosystem recovery. Early results are promising, with good predictive relationships observed between the immediate char fraction and 1-yr post-fire field measures of the weight of organic litter. For more information:

Smith, A.M.S., .Lentile, L.B., Hudak, A.T. and Morgan P., 2007 Evaluation of linear spectral unmixing and dNBR for predicting post-fire recovery in a North American ponderosa pine forest, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 22, 20, 5159-5166. (PDF)

Lentile, L.B*., Smith, A.M.S*., Hudak, A.T., Morgan, P. and Bobbitt, M., [* Equal Contribution] Remote sensing for prediction of 1-year post-fire ecosystem condition, International Journal of Wildland Fire, Accepted Pending Revisions.