Journal of Geography  & Natural Disasters
Open Access

Abstract

Method for Burned Forest Biomass Estimation at Subcompartment Level Using GF-1 images and GIS Datasets

Xianlin Qin, Lingyu Ying, Guifen Sun and Xiaofeng Zu

To estimate the burned biomass and get the burned fuel types information by forest fire for the need of Chinese forestry management, basing on the fuel load from digital reference data, the combustion factor gotten from fieldwork, and the results of burned scar mapping by using the No.1 High-Resolution satellite (GF-1) of Chinese, the burned biomass estimation method at the subcompartment level has been developed using satellite images and Geography datasets. The method has been validated by the selected forest fire, which had taken place in Huangcaobai of Anning City, Yunnan province in year 2012.The total burned biomass is about 1.18 × 108 kg by using the panchromatic and multispectral scanners (PMS) image of GF-1; however, it is about 1.11 × 108 kg by using the Wide Coverage Image (WFV) of GF-1. The difference between them is 7.10 × 106 kg. This study also supplies a method for the single forest fire case when the fire radiative power (FRP) or fire radiative energy (FRE) of detected active fire points by using sparse low spatial resolution satellite images doesn’t satisfied the condition of Power Law distribution or Gaissian function.