Monitoring fire-affected areas using Thematic Mapper data

In this paper three methods for updating inventories of burned areas have b een presented and examined. They include Multitemporal Principal Component Analysis (MPCA), Change Vector Analysis (CVA) and Multitemporal NDVI Classi fication (MNC). First, 11 Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) images of a forest area were radiometrically corrected to derive a multitemporal series of in tercomparable images for each spring from 1984 to 1994. Then, in order to c heck the feasibility of the three approaches, they were used for mapping fi re burns that occurred during 1992. The various procedures yielded differen t maps of burned areas; the MNC method seemed to be more reliable than the others, because it merges spectral data corresponding not only to 1992 (pre -fire) and 1993 (post-fire) but also to 1994 (the second year after the fir es), which is key in the vegetation regeneration. Finally, this methodology was automated to yield an inventory of burned areas for each year during t he period of study.