Projects per year
Abstract
West African savannas are subject to regular fires, which have impacts on vegetation structure, biodiversity and carbon balance. An efficient and accurate mapping of burned area associated with seasonal fires can greatly benefit decision making in land management. Since coarse resolution burned area products cannot meet the accuracy needed for fire management and climate modelling at local scales, the medium resolution Landsat data is a promising alternative for local scale studies. In this study, we developed an algorithm for continuous monitoring of annual burned areas using Landsat time series. The algorithm is based on burned pixel detection using harmonic model fitting with Landsat time series and breakpoint identification in the time series data. This approach was tested in a savanna area in southern Burkina Faso using 281 images acquired between October 2000 and April 2016. An overall accuracy of 79.2% was obtained with balanced omission and commission errors. This represents a significant improvement in comparison with MODIS burned area product (67.6%), which had more omission errors than commission errors, indicating underestimation of the total burned area. By observing the spatial distribution of burned areas, we found that the Landsat based method misclassified cropland and cloud shadows as burned areas due to the similar spectral response, and MODIS burned area product omitted small and fragmented burned areas. The proposed algorithm is flexible and robust against decreased data availability caused by clouds and Landsat 7 missing lines, therefore having a high potential for being applied in other landscapes in future studies.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Journal | International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation |
Volume | 64 |
Pages (from-to) | 210-220 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISSN | 0303-2434 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2018 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Fields of Science
- 1172 Environmental sciences
- 114 Physical sciences
- 4112 Forestry
- Burned area
- Landsat time series
- Harmonic model
- Breakpoint identification
- MODIS
- WEST-AFRICA
- SPECTRAL INDEXES
- MODIS IMAGERY
- CLOUD SHADOW
- FIRE HISTORY
- COVER CHANGE
- FOREST
- ALGORITHM
- PRODUCTS
- VEGETATION
Projects
- 1 Finished
-
BIODEV: Building biocarbon and rural development in West Africa
Pellikka, P. (Project manager), Heiskanen, J. (Participant), Adhikari, H. (Participant) & Liu, J. (Participant)
01/01/2012 → 31/12/2016
Project: Research project