What are long term impacts of fires on vegetation recovery processes and trajectories?

Is the trajectory of post-fire vegetation recovery changing? (UCI)

Southern California has experienced large, recent changes in climate (warming and increasing precipitation variability), fire frequency (increasing), and the abundance of invasive species (increasing) (Keeley et al. 2005). The Landsat time series makes it possible to examine whether the rates and patterns of vegetation recovery after fire are changing (Fig. 6) - For example, are the patterns of recovery from fires in the mid 1980s similar to those in the mid 1990s and the mid 2000s? We will compare the trajectory of species composition, NPP, and ET for fires occurring in 1980’s, 1990’s, and 2000’s and investigate if the rate and patterns of vegetation recovery are changing. We will rely on vegetation indices, as well as regression tree (Hansen et al. 2000) and SMA algorithms (Roberts et al. 1993), to derive the species composition (such as percent woody and herbaceous, percent barren) at annual time scales. We will collect at least 3 images per year for the three SCA scenes (mostly P40R36, P40R36, and P41R36). We will calculate the monthly post-fire NPP and evapotranspiration using CASA as described in 3.1.4.