TITLE:
Vegetation Regrowth Following Wildfires in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California Monitored Using Landsat Satellite Image Analysis
AUTHORS:
Christopher S. Potter
KEYWORDS:
Landsat, California, Santa Cruz Mountains, Forest, Shrub, Wildfire, Drought, NDVI
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Forestry,
Vol.6 No.2,
February
5,
2016
ABSTRACT: The Santa
Cruz Mountain range in northern California is a coastal landscape with a
history of extensive forest logging and frequent large wildfires that have
recently destroyed numerous residential structures at the wildland interface.
Results from Landsat satellite image time-series analysis since 1984 of the
study area within the Los Gatos Creek and Corralitos Creek watersheds showed
that none of the severe drought periods since the 1980s have notably inhibited
rapid tree and shrub regrowth rates on steep hill slopes burned recently by the
1985 Lexington Fire and the 2008 Summit Fire. In high burn severity areas of
both fires, post-fire vegetation types showed a marked increase in shrub cover,
mainly at the expense of evergreen tree cover. Most of these low (·ha-1 of standing woody biomass on
the burned areas. This study is the first of its kind to utilize a full 30-year
record of Landsat vegetation index data to monitor tree and shrub regrowth
after stand-replacing wildfires in California.