Evaluating post-fire vegetation regrowth in Brazil’s Chapada Diamantina National Park using remote sensing

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Sarah Moura Batista dos
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Bento-Gonçalves, António, Vieira, António, Santos, Jonathas, Ganem, Khalil Ali, Franca-Rocha, Washington, Figueiredo, Raiânnata Machado, Duverger, Soltan Galano
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/82403
• topic: Google Earth Engine; Landsat 8; Vegetation regrowth; Forest fire; NBR; Regeneração da vegetação; Incêndios florestais; Ciências Naturais::Ciências da Terra e do Ambiente

Understanding fire dynamics in vegetation is essential for assessing the impacts caused by wildfire action, especially because biomass burning in ecosystems has been indicated as one of the main factors that impact climate and biodiversity. A current alternative to detecting fire via satellite data is cloud processing platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE). Given this context, this work aims to assess the degree of vegetation regrowth after a wildfire in an area included in the Chapada Diamantina National Park (Bahia - Brazil) based on applying the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) in Landsat Surface Reflectance Tier 1 data sets. The images were accessed and processed on the GEE platform. The NBR index was more sensitive to the pre- and post-fire displacements of the pixels affected by the fires between the Landsat NIR and SWIR image bands. We found that the NBR mean values decreased immediately after the fire occurrence in the entire study area. Then, following the wildfire, the NBR mean values returned to conditions similar to those that preceded the fire. We can conclude that the plant biomass had already recovered considerably nine months after the fire when checking the NBR values. Therefore, this study points out the need to better understand the wildfire dynamics in the Chapada Diamantina National Park region and the impact associated with these events, with respect to fire ecology.