Comparison of Single- and Multi-date Landsat Data for Mapping Wildfire Scars in Ocala National Forest, Florida

Department of Geography, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056 ([email protected]). Abstract Remote sensing techniques have been widely used to map fire scars in the western United States, but have not been thoroughly tested in the eastern portion of the country. In this study, a 1998 Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image and a 1999 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM1) image were used to test different image enhancements and classification algorithms for mapping wildfire scars in Ocala National Forest, Florida. Single-date analysis was conducted using the 1999 image, while both images were used to complete multi-temporal analysis. Both singleand multi-date datasets were classified using a traditional method (maximum likelihood classification: MLC) and a non-parametric technique (classification and regression trees: CART). Comparison of all techniques showed that MLC of a single image (1999) resulted in high accuracy compared to the other methods and that principal components analysis (PCA) and multitemporal PCA provided the best spectral separability between burned and unburned areas.