Remote Sensing of Wildfire Using a Small Unmanned Aerial System: Post-Fire Mapping, Vegetation Recovery and Damage Analysis in Grand Bay, Mississippi/Alabama, USA

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Remote Sensing of Wildfire Using a Small Unmanned Aerial System: Post-Fire Mapping, Vegetation Recovery and Damage Analysis in Grand Bay, Mississippi/Alabama, USA

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Sathishkumar Samiappan / Lee Hathcock / Gray Turnage / Cary McCraine / Jonathan Pitchford / Robert Moorhead

Wildfires can be beneficial for native vegetation. However, wildfires can impact property values, human safety, and ecosystem function. Resource managers require safe, easy to use, timely, and cost-effective methods for quantifying wildfire damage and regeneration. In this work, we demonstrate an approach using an unmanned aerial system (UAS) equipped with a MicaSense RedEdge multispectral sensor to classify and estimate wildfire damage in a coastal marsh. We collected approximately 7.2 km² of five-band multispectral imagery after a wildfire event in February 2016, which was used to create a photogrammetry-based digital surface model (DSM) and orthomosaic for object-based classification analysis. Airborne light detection and ranging data were used to validate the accuracy of the DSM. Four-band airborne imagery from pre- and post-fire were used to estimate pre-fire health, post-fire damage, and track the vegetation recovery process. Immediate and long-term post-fire classifications, area, and volume of burned regions were produced to track the revegetation progress. The UAS-based classification produced from normalized difference vegetation index and DSM was compared to the Landsat-based Burned Area Reflectance Classification. Experimental results show the potential of using UAS and the presented approach compared to satellite-based mapping in terms of classification accuracies, turnaround time, and spatial and temporal resolutions.

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Title :

Remote Sensing of Wildfire Using a Small Unmanned Aerial System: Post-Fire Mapping, Vegetation Recovery and Damage Analysis in Grand Bay, Mississippi/Alabama, USA

Contributors:

Sathishkumar Samiappan (author) / Lee Hathcock (author) / Gray Turnage (author) / Cary McCraine (author) / Jonathan Pitchford (author) / Robert Moorhead (author)

Published in:

Drones, Vol 3, Iss 2, p 43 (2019)

Publication date :

2019

ISSN :

2504-446X

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.3390/drones3020043

Type of media :

Article (Journal)

Type of material :

Electronic Resource