Assessment of Spectral Vegetation Indices Performance for Post-Fire Monitoring of Different Forest Environments

Although wildfires are a common disturbance factor to the environment, some of them can cause significant environmental and socioeconomic losses, affecting ecosystems and people worldwide. The wildfire identification and assessment of their effects on damaged forest areas is of great importance for provision of effective actions on their management and preservation. Forest regrowth after a fire is a continuously evolving and dynamic process, and the accuracy assessment of different remote sensing indices for its evaluation is a complicated task. The implementation of this task cannot rely on the standard procedures. Therefore, we suggested a method involving delineation of dynamic boundaries between conditional categories within burnt forest areas by application of spectral reflectance characteristics (SRC). This study compared the performance of firmly established for fire monitoring differenced vegetation indices—Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (dNDVI) and Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and tested the capabilities of tasseled cap-derived differenced Disturbance Index (dDI) for post-fire monitoring purposes in different forest environments (Boreal Mountain Forest (BMF), Mediterranean Mountain Forest (MMF), Mediterranean Hill Forest (MHF)). The accuracy assessment of the tree indices was performed using Very High Resolution (VHR) aerial and satellite data. The results show that dDI has an optimal performance in monitoring post-fire disturbances in more difficult-to-be-differentiated classes, whereas, for post-fire regrowth, the more appropriate is dNDVI. In the first case, dDI has an overall accuracy of 50%, whereas the accuracy of dNBR and dNDVI is barely 35% and 36%. Moreover, dDI shows better performance in 16 accuracy metrics (from 17). In the second case, dNDVI has an overall accuracy of 59%, whereas those of dNBR and dDI are 55% and 52%, and the accuracy metrics in which dNDVI shows better performance than the other two indices are 11 (from 13). Generally, the studied indices showed higher accuracy in assessment of post-fire disturbance rather than of the post-fire forest regrowth, implicitly at test areas—BMF and MMF, and contrary opposite result in the accuracy at MHF. This indicates the relation of the indices’ accuracy to the heterogeneity of the environment.