Ecological Change Detection of Burnt Forest Area Using Multi-temporal LANDSAT TM Data

The tremendous huge forest fire broke out along the East Coast in Gangwon Province, Korea and lasted over a week in April 2000. More than 16,000 hectares of forest area was assumed to be burnt and damaged by forest fire. In order to detect and assess the forest ecosystem changes of forest burnt area over times, multi-temporal Landsat TM data obtained in May 20, 1998 (before fire occurrence), May 25, 2000 (a month later after fire extinction) and May 28, 2001 (a year later after fire) were used, respectively.

After image to image registrations, NDVI values were derived from time series image data set and Image Differencing algorithm was applied to detect changes. The NDVI value of burnt forest was revealed to be 151.2 in 2000 image and this value was extremely lower than 191.8 of 1998 image. But the NDVI(178.8) of 2001 image, just one year later was higher than that of image 2000. This result indicates that the vegetation cover of burnt forest area was getting recovered after forest fire.