Fire mapping in a northern boreal forest: assessing AVHRR/NDVI methods of change detection

Understanding natural fire regimes is crucial to developing harvesting scenarios and conducting sustainable resource management in the boreal forest. To gain this understanding, resource professionals need efficient and cost-effective data collection methods that can operate over vast and isolated landscapes. We compared three Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)/Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) methods of fire detection and mapping for a case study in northern Ontario, Canada, of the 1992, 1993, and 1995 fire seasons. Fire mapping accuracy was assessed by the spatial coincidence between mapped fires and ground-truthed information using a decision-tree approach and by testing the hypothesis that various calculated accuracy components were equal within an ANOVA design. Ground-truthed fire sizes and shapes were correlated with the AVHRR/NDVI-mapped areas; however, light cloud contamination increased false detection of fires due to NDVI suppression. The multiple threshold technique of change detection provided better estimates of fire areas than did single threshold methods. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.