Abstract
Recently, the number of forest fires in West Siberian Lowland (WSL) is increasing and they are considered as one of the main driving factors influencing carbon cycling in whole earth. Since many forest fires take place in large and hardly accessible areas, remote sensing seems to be the most appropriate tool for creating forest fire recovering history. In this paper, SPOT HRV and Landsat ETM images were used to highlight the damaged area by fire that occurred in the summer of 1998. The damaged area was extracted by using principal component analysis supplemented by ground truth data. The total burnt area was calculated to be 13.8 (km2). Then re-generation condition in burnt area from 1995 to 2002 was investigated using NOAA AVHRR data with sub-pixel land cover characterization. We demonstrate that the phenomena observed by remote sensing data is consistent with climatic data including daily precipitation and temperature. The method proposed in this study can be an effective way for forest recovering monitoring.
