Evaluating post-fire recovery of Latroon dry forest using Landsat ETM plus , unmanned aerial vehicle and field survey data

We evaluated the fire severity and recovery process of the Latroon dry forest in Jordan following the 2003 fire. A series of multi-temporal Landsat-ETM + data and the delta normalized burn ratio (dNBR) were used to map the fire severity immediately following the fire and 1,5,9,13 and 17 years after. In addition, combined field morphophysiological measurements, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) were also used in 2020 to assess the forest recovery. Landsat-dNBR images revealed that about 65% of the forest was burned in 2003. In 2020, about 90% of the burned area recovered to condition before fire. UAV means were similar to ground measurement data across the severity classes and over the tested species. Landsat-dNBR images showed that most moderate and highly severe burned area in 2003 had recovered in 2020 but ground measurements showed that the severely burned area trees were significantly shorter (p < 0.001) than those from the moderate severity across the studied species. Therefore, Landsat-dNBR did not detect tree height changes. While UAV can potentially estimate the tree height, Landsat-ETM+ (near-infrared, chlorophyll; shortwave-infrared, water status) hold promise for estimating the physiology of the canopy. Overall, different remote sensing levels are required to track different kinds of changes in the recovered forests.

Automated summary

By using remote sensing data and field measurements, we studied the fire severity and recovery process of the Latroon dry forest in Jordan after the 2003 fire, finding that about 65% of the forest was burned. UAV assessments showed that 90% of the burned area had recovered to pre-fire conditions by 2020, but tree heights in severely burned areas were significantly lower than those in moderately burned areas.