Olga Viedma
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
Title: Feedbacks between fire and landscape using remote sensing and GIS
Biography
Biography: Olga Viedma
Abstract
During last decades, fire activity has been changing in several countries bordering the Mediterranean basin. Changes in socio-economic factors that affect landscapes and ignitions may have played a role. In this work, we will show different methods to assess fire activity, the role of the various drivers on fire activity and the main fire effects on the landscape by means of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) technologies. We will focus on the main methods to reconstruct the spatio-temporal patterns of fire regime from time series of Landsat images, including main pre-processing and fire mapping techniques. Later, we will assess how land use-land cover (LULC) changes have increased fire-hazard, as well as how the role of environmental and socioeconomic factors have changed over time, focusing on promising statistical approaches. We will show how to model fire activity in a spatially and temporally explicit way, assessing the role of landscape features and socio-economic factors on daily fire frequency. Finally, we will assess the fire effects on landscapes modeling fire severity (from Landsat images) from several factors as the pre-fire stand structure, directional topography and burning conditions. We conclude with an example of modeling post-fire species richness one year after a fire (from QuickBird imagery) using multiscale, spatially explicit predictive models.