MyJournals Home  

RSS FeedsRemote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 144: Satellite-Based Assessment of Grassland Conversion and Related Fire Disturbance in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska (Remote Sensing)

 
 

14 january 2019 02:01:35

 
Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 144: Satellite-Based Assessment of Grassland Conversion and Related Fire Disturbance in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska (Remote Sensing)
 


Spruce beetle-induced (Dendroctonus rufipennis (Kirby)) mortality on the Kenai Peninsula has been hypothesized by local ecologists to result in the conversion of forest to grassland and subsequent increased fire danger. This hypothesis stands in contrast to empirical studies in the continental US which suggested that beetle mortality has only a negligible effect on fire danger. In response, we conducted a study using Landsat data and modeling techniques to map land cover change in the Kenai Peninsula and to integrate change maps with other geospatial data to predictively map fire danger for the same region. We collected Landsat imagery to map land cover change at roughly five-year intervals following a severe, mid-1990s beetle infestation to the present. Land cover classification was performed at each time step and used to quantify grassland encroachment patterns over time. The maps of land cover change along with digital elevation models (DEMs), temperature, and historical fire data were used to map and assess wildfire danger across the study area. Results indicate the highest wildfire danger tended to occur in herbaceous and black spruce land cover types, suggesting that the relationship between spruce beetle damage and wildfire danger in costal Alaskan forested ecosystems differs from the relationship between the two in the forests of the coterminous United States. These change detection analyses and fire danger predictions provide the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge (KENWR) ecologists and other forest managers a better understanding of the extent and magnitude of grassland conversion and subsequent change in fire danger following the 1990s spruce beetle outbreak.


 
114 viewsCategory: Geology, Physics
 
Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 145: Automatic Annotation of Airborne Images by Label Propagation Based on a Bayesian-CRF Model (Remote Sensing)
Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 143: Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Smallholder Irrigated Agriculture in the Horn of Africa Using GEOBIA and Sentinel-2 Imagery (Remote Sensing)
 
 
blog comments powered by Disqus


MyJournals.org
The latest issues of all your favorite science journals on one page

Username:
Password:

Register | Retrieve

Search:

Physics


Copyright © 2008 - 2024 Indigonet Services B.V.. Contact: Tim Hulsen. Read here our privacy notice.
Other websites of Indigonet Services B.V.: Nieuws Vacatures News Tweets Nachrichten