Multitemporal Ers and Envisat Imagery for the Estimation of the Reforestation Process of Burned Areas

In this study the potentialities of ERS/ENVISAT-SAR multitemporal data for the analysis of the reforestation process over burned areas are investigated. The summer 2000 fire devastating a large part of the Castel Fusano pinewood (near Rome) is the selected test case. A first objective is to evaluate the capability of detecting the boundaries of the burned area only using SAR imagery and considering optical data (Landsat) as ground truth. A second one is to retrieve information on the stage of the reforestation process from multitemporal backscattering signature. To this purpose both areas within and out of the fire scar have been considered and their SAR returns have been examined over several passes of the satellites before and after the event.