RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article T1 Burn severity and post-fire land surface albedo relationship in Mediterranean forest ecosystems A1 Quintano Pastor, María del Carmen A1 Fernández Manso, Alfonso A1 Marcos Porras, Elena María A1 Calvo, Leonor K1 Albedo K1 Landsat K1 Forests K1 Bosques AB Our study explores the relationship between land surface albedo (LSA) changes and burn severity, checking whether the LSA is an indicator of burn severity, in a large forest fire (117.75 km2, Spain). The LSA was obtained from Landsat data. In particular, we used an immediately-after-fire scene, a year-after-fire scene and a pre-fire one. The burn severity (three levels) was assessed in 111 field plots by using the Composite Burn Index (CBI). The potentiality of remotely sensed LSA as an indicator for the burn severity was tested by a one-way analysis of variance, correlation analysis and regression models. Specifically, we considered the total shortwave, visible, and near-infrared LSA. Immediately after the fire, we observed a decrease in the LSA for all burn severity levels (up to 0.631). A small increase in the LSA was found (up to 0.0292) a year after the fire. The maximum adjusted coefficient of determination (R2adj) of the linear regression model between the immediately post-fire LSA image and the CBI values was approximately 67%. Fisher’s least significance difference test showed that two burn severity levels could be discriminated by the immediately post-fire LSA image. Our results demonstrate that the magnitude of the changes in the LSA is related to the burn severity with a statistical significance, suggesting the potentiality of immediately-after-fire remotely sensed LSA for estimating the burn severity as an alternative to other satellite-based methods. However, the persistency of these changes in time should be evaluated in future research. PB MDPI SN 2072-4292 YR 2019 FD 2019 LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/53651 UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/53651 LA eng NO Remote Sensing, 2019, vol. 11, n. 19, 2309 NO Producción Científica DS UVaDOC RD 11-jul-2024