There is an increasing interest to use passive microwave vegetation optical depth (VOD) to study the vegetation and its evolution, which led to the start of this OSMOSE project. A paper was recently published about the impacts of fires on the biomass and how these are observed by different satellite sensors.
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/3317/2022/bg-19-3317-2022.html
Abstract
Anthropogenic climate change is now considered to be one of the main factors causing an increase in both the frequency and severity of wildfires. These fires are prone to release substantial quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and to endanger natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Depending on the ecosystem and climate regime, fires have distinct triggering factors and impacts. To better analyse this phenomenon, we investigated post-fire vegetation anomalies over different biomes, from 2012 to 2020. The study was performed using several remotely sensed quantities ranging from visible–infrared vegetation indices (the enhanced vegetation index (EVI)) to vegetation opacities obtained at several passive-microwave wavelengths (X-band, C-band, and L-band vegetation optical depth (X-VOD, C-VOD, and L-VOD)), ranging from 2 to 20 cm. It was found that C- and X-VOD are mostly sensitive to fire impact on low-vegetation areas (grass and shrublands) or on tree leaves, while L-VOD depicts the fire impact on tree trunks and branches better. As a consequence, L-VOD is probably a better way of assessing fire impact on biomass. The study shows that L-VOD can be used to monitor fire-affected areas as well as post-fire recovery, especially over densely vegetated areas.
Reference
Bousquet, E., Mialon, A., Rodriguez-Fernandez, N., Mermoz, S., & Kerr, Y. (2022). Monitoring post-fire recovery of various vegetation biomes using multi-wavelength satellite remote sensing. Biogeosciences, 19(13), 3317-3336.