Vegetation change detection and recovery assessment based on post-fire satellite imagery using deep learning

Abstract

AbstractWildfires are uncontrolled fires fuelled by dry conditions, high winds, and flammable materials that profoundly impact vegetation, leading to significant consequences including noteworthy changes to ecosystems. In this study, we provide a novel methodology to understand and evaluate post-fire effects on vegetation. In regions affected by wildfires, earth-observation data from various satellite sources can be vital in monitoring vegetation and assessing its impact. These effects can be understood by detecting vegetation change over the years using a novel unsupervised method termed Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC), which enables us to classify regions based on whether there has been a change in vegetation after the fire. Our model achieves an impressive accuracy of 96.17%. Appropriate vegetation indices can be used to evaluate the evolution of vegetation patterns over the years; for this study, we utilized Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) based trend analysis showing the greening fraction, which ranges from 0.1 to 22.4 km2 while the browning fraction ranges from 0.1 to 18.1 km2 over the years. Vegetation recovery maps can be created to assess re-vegetation in regions affected by the fire, which is performed via a deep learning-based unsupervised method, Adaptive Generative Adversarial Neural Network Model (AdaptiGAN) on post-fire data collected from various regions affected by wildfire with a training error of 0.075 proving its capability. Based on the results obtained from the study, our approach tends to have notable merits when compared to pre-existing works.