Alegria, C. Aboveground Biomass Mapping and Fire Potential Severity Assessment: A Case Study for Eucalypts and Shrubland Areas in the Central Inland Region of Portugal. Forests2023, 14, 1795.
Alegria, C. Aboveground Biomass Mapping and Fire Potential Severity Assessment: A Case Study for Eucalypts and Shrubland Areas in the Central Inland Region of Portugal. Forests 2023, 14, 1795.
Alegria, C. Aboveground Biomass Mapping and Fire Potential Severity Assessment: A Case Study for Eucalypts and Shrubland Areas in the Central Inland Region of Portugal. Forests2023, 14, 1795.
Alegria, C. Aboveground Biomass Mapping and Fire Potential Severity Assessment: A Case Study for Eucalypts and Shrubland Areas in the Central Inland Region of Portugal. Forests 2023, 14, 1795.
Abstract
Shrubland and forestland covers are highly prone to fire. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) has been widely used for biomass quantitative assessment. This study aims were the following: (1) to compute the NDVI annual curve for two types of land cover eucalypts and shrubland areas; (2) to collect field data in these two types of land cover to estimate aboveground biomass (AGB); and (3) to produce AGB maps for eucalypts and shrubland areas by modelling AGB with NDVI and validate them with other data sources. A study area in the central inland Portugal was considered. The Sentinel-2 MSI imagery for the year of 2022 and 2023 were used to compute the NDVI. The NDVI annual curve for 2022 showed a minimum observed between July and August, in accordance with the climatological data, and allowed differentiating eucalypts from shrubland areas. Spectral signatures also confirmed this differentiation. The fitted linear models for AGB prediction using the NDVI imagery showed good fitting performances (R2 of 0.76 and 0.69). The AGB maps provide a relevant decision support tool for forest management and for fire hazard and fire severity mitigation. Further research is needed using more robust data sets for models’ independent validation.
Keywords
Biomass components; Carbon sequestration; NDVI-CV method; Spectral signatures; Fire hazard; Fire potential severity
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Forestry
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
