Spectral Assessment of Vegetational Recovery Following the Owyhee Mountains' 2015 Soda Fire
Presentation Time: Tue, 08/08/2023 - 10:30
Keywords: Normalized Burn Ratio, Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index, Differenced Normalized Burn Ratio, Sagebrush, Sagebrush Steppe, Wildfire, Landsat 8
Between August 10 and August 23, 2015, the Soda Fire burned 279,144 acres of the sagebrush steppe ecosystem in Idaho’s Owyhee and Oregon’s Malheur counties, southwest of Idaho’s capital, Boise. This project attempts to examine, visualize, and explain the impacts of this fire on the sagebrush steppe, while demonstrating the need for boots-on-the-ground perspective to give context to spectral analysis like the Landsat 8 data used in this study. The dNBR analysis shows a largely net-neutral or positive change in vegetation in comparison to pre-fire values with a mean value of -0.02. Future NDVI analyses will demonstrate the overall health of vegetation, which will then be compared against a 3-year average of NDVI values. This final analysis will demonstrate the spectral change in vegetation quality post-fire, from 2015 to July 2020.
