Land cover plays a major role in many biogeochemical models that represent processes and connections with terrestrial systems; hence, it is a key component for public decisions in ecosystems management. The advance of remote sensing technology, combined with the emergence of new operational products, offers alternatives to improve the accuracy of environmental monitoring and analysis. This work...

A series of fire experiments were carried out in a wind tunnel at the United States Forest Service’s Fire Science Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. The experiments involved tines cut out of pieces of cardboard. The pieces were laid out in comb-like strips parallel to each other along a testbed. They were ignited at the windward end of the testbed. The progress of the fire was monitored by thermo...

Understanding disturbance and recovery of forest landscapes is a challenge because of complex interactions over a range of temporal and spatial scales. Landscape simulation models offer an approach to studying such systems at broad scales. Fire can be simulated spatially using mechanistic or stochastic approaches. We describe the fire module in a spatially explicit, stochastic model of forest l...

This paper presents the results of an operational nationwide burnt area mapping service realized over Greece for the years 2007-2011, through the implementation of the so-called BSM_NOA dedicated method developed at the National Observatory of Athens for post-fire recovery management. The method exploits multispectral satellite imagery, such as Landsat-TM, SPOT, FORMOSAT-2, WorldView and IKONOS...

Fire plays an increasingly significant role in tropical forest and savanna ecosystems, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and impacting on biodiversity. Emerging research shows the potential role of Indigenous land-use practices for controlling deforestation and reducing CO2 emissions. Analysis of satellite imagery suggests that Indigenous lands have the lowest incidence of wildfires, sig...

Fires are adverse events with tangible costs for property and human life. Quantification of the immediate and direct costs of fire provide a metric for understanding the social and economic impact of fire and for assessing progress in fire prevention and protection. In addition to their physical costs, fires have a range of less immediate and obvious adverse consequences on the natural environm...

Fire history and forest structural characteristics of adjacent Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi) and upper montane forests was investigated in the eastern Sierra Nevada at the University of California Valentine Natural Reserve. Jeffrey pine forests had lower canopy cover, higher amounts of fine fuels, and higher shrub cover when compared to upper montane forest that were dominated by red fir (Abies...

Characterizing biophysical changes in land change areas over large regions with short and noisy multivariate time series and multiple temporal parameters remains a challenging task. Most studies focus on detection rather than the characterization, i.e., the manner by which surface state variables are altered by the process of changes. In this study, a procedure is presented to extract and chara...

What are the ecological effects of fires? The evaluation of fireaffected areas and fire severity is of primary importance to answer this question, because fire strongly affects the ecological processes, such as, productivity level, creation of altered patches, modification in vegetation structure and shifts in vegetation cover composition, as well as land surface processes (such as surface ener...