Land Cover Change Detection Using Landsat Tm Imagery of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires

The 2009 Victorian bushfires, also called the Black Saturday bushfires, ignited across the Australian state of Victoria on Saturday 7 February 2009, resulting in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire. According to the Victorian Police, the bushfires caused at least 173 known deaths of people and 414 people injured. The use of multispectral Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data was able to detect and analyse the land cover changes caused by the bushfires in a rapid and cost-effective way. Many digital change detection techniques, such as image differencing and post-classification have been widely used for this purpose. The objective of this research was to quantify land cover changes by using two Landsat TM data, one pre-fire and one post-fire, acquired on 1 March 2008 and 21 April 2009, respectively, and to examine the strength and weakness of different methods. Change detection results derived from each method were assessed for accuracy against ground survey.