Education Markets Other Technology

Evaluating Forest Fire Damage Using LiDAR

  1. LiDAR can be used in conjunction with digital aerial photography to remotely classify the degree of forest fire damage.
  2. An increase in the number of ground points indicates more heavily damaged areas.
  3. This research is reported in the March 2010 PE & RS.

LiDAR can be used to evaluate the degree of physical damage from a forest fire by evaluating the loss of canopy height and width. This can be inferred from the increase in ground points obtained in more heavily damaged areas. When combined with an assessment of the biological damage using digital aerial photography and the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index – NDVI, a standard remote sensing technique, the results can be superior to other evaluation techniques.

These are the results recently reported in a March 2010 PE & RS journal article entitled, Evaluation for Damaged Degree of Vegetation by Forest Fire using Lidar and a Digital Aerial Photograph, by Kwak, et al. Based on the the degree of damage, the appropriate methods can be used to restore the burned areas. In the more heavily damaged areas the remaining stems will have to be removed and new seedlings planted. In the lighter damaged areas natural restoration can be relied on.

This automated approach produced better results than previous studies.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.