Detection of fire impact and vegetation recovery over tropical peat swamp forest by satellite data and ground-based NDVI instrument

Abstract

Multitemporal Principal Component Analysis (MPCA) was used for processing Landsat TM/ETM+ satellite images. MPCA was able to merge spectral data corresponding to TM-1996 (pre-fire in 1997), ETM-2000 (post-fire 1997 and pre-fire 2002) and ETM-2003 (post-fire in 2002), which was crucial for detecting the fire impact and vegetation recovery. Results indicate that the burnt areas of 1997 and 2002 were 89,086 ha (16.5%) and 31,859 ha (5.9%), respectively, within the study area of 540,000 ha. SPOT-VEGETATION 10-days Maximum Value Composite (MVC) data were also used and compared with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from ground-based NDVI. Our research demonstrates the strong relationship between Landsat TM/ETM+, SPOT-VEGETATION data and ground-based NDVI to identifying land cover changes and vegetation recovery over the tropical peat swamp forest area in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia that is affected by forest fires that occurred in 1997 and 2002.