Abstract

This paper reports on an integrated assessment in Sudan of woodland biomass loss in a tropical African savannah based on remote sensing. We used 272 winter MODIS reflectance images (500m resolution, 16-day interval) between Oct 15 and Mar 07 from 2000 to 2009 to produce a series of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The technique of differencing and thresholding on NBR combined with supervised classification on MODIS images was applied to identify the burned areas and assess the severity of burning. To verify the processing results from MODIS data, we used 35 Landsat ETM+ images taken during the winter periods between 2000 and 2003 as well as a number of QuickBird images between 2004 and 2009 available in Google Earth. Regression models of woody biomass developed earlier by the authors were applied to estimate the burnt woody biomass and carbon emission into atmosphere.

© 2010 Optical Society of America