Monitoring Vegetation Greenness With Satellite Data

By monitoring the greenness of vegetation, it may be possible to provide fire management agencies with timely information on changing forest hazard conditions. This study monitors general seasonal variation in greenness throughout the 1993 growing season in Ontario using 1-kilometre resolution Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer ten-day composites. Data for several sample sites across Ontario's major forest regions are analyzed to report on the seasonal trends. A second aspect of the study monitors annual variation in greenness by studying four phenologically coincident scenes of the Sudbury Basin, with images taken over two decades using 50-metre-resolution LANDSAT data and analyzed to show increases in vegetation due to reductions in sulphur dioxide emissions. A simple regression equation that depends on a fuel moisture parameter was used to model and predict forest fire occurrence in the Basin area and indicate the effect of revegetation on forest fire decreases.

Introduction Increasing conflagrations of forests and other lands throughout the world during the 1980s and 1990s have made fires in forest and other vegetation emerge as an important global concern. Both the number and severity of wildfires (accidental fires) and the application of fire for land-use change, seem to have increased dramatically compared to previous decades of the twentieth century. The adverse consequences of extensive wildfires cross national boundaries and have global impacts. Fire regimes are changing with climate variability and population dynamics. Satellite remote sensing technology has the potential to play an important role for monitoring fires and their consequences, as well as in operational fire management. In response to this need as well as to respond to other needs for more rapid progress in forest observation, in 1997 the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) initiated Global Observation of Forest Cover (GOFC) as an international pilot project to test the concepts of an Integrated Global Observing System. The GOFC program is currently part of the Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS). GOFC was designed to bring together data providers and information users to make information products from satellite and in-situ observations of forests more readily available worldwide. Fire Monitoring and Mapping was formed as one of three basic components of GOFC. This book contains eighteen contributions authored by scientists who represent the most active international research and development institutions, aiming at coordinating and improving international efforts for user-oriented systems and products. These papers were initially presented at a GOFC Fire Workshop held at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra. The volume is a contribution of the GOFC Forest Fire Monitoring and Mapping Implementation Team to the Interagency Task Force Working Group Wildland Fire of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).