Remote Sensing-Based Monitoring of Postfire Recovery of Persistent Shrubs: The Case of Juniperus communis in Sierra Nevada (Spain)
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Blanco-Sacristán, Javier; Guirado Hernández, Emilio; Molina Pardo, José Luis; Cabello Piñar, Francisco Javier; Giménez Luque, Esther; [et al.]Date
2022-12-22Abstract
Wildfires affect the structure, functioning, and composition of ecosystems. Long-term monitoring of the occurrence, abundance, and growth of plant species is key to assessing the responses of the dynamics of plant populations with regard to environmental disturbances, such as wildfires. In this work, we evaluated the changes in the number of individuals and the canopy cover extent of a population of Juniperus communis L. during a four-decade period following a wildfire in a Mediterranean high-mountain ecosystem (Sierra Nevada, Spain). To do this, we used object-based image analysis (OBIA) applied to very high-resolution aerial images. Our study also provides a new approach to optimize the shrub identification process and to semi-automatically evaluate the accuracy of the number of shrubs and their canopy cover. From the 752 individuals present in 1977, only 433 remained immediately after a fire (1984), a few more disappeared one decade later (420 shrubs in 1997), while by 2008, the pop...
Palabra/s clave
object-based image analysis
OBIA
shrub
Juniperus communis
monitoring
persistence
segmentation
Sierra Nevada