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Mapping the annual area burned in the wetlands of the Okavango panhandle using a hierarchical classification approach

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Abstract

This paper documents the methodology developed to identify burned areas accurately, and to quantify the spatial extent of the areas burned, in the wetlands of Botswana’s Okavango panhandle in 2001. Physical identification of burned areas in marshy wetlands is extremely difficult. Burned areas are short-lived, limiting opportunities for ground-based measurement, which is often further hampered by extreme inaccessibility, and the unpredictable nature of the location and timing of burning. Given these challenges, satellite imagery has the potential to provide an excellent alternative for such analyses. However, burned areas can be spectrally confused with non-vegetated wetland areas such as open water and muddy flats, particularly when relying predominantly on the near-infrared band. This study addresses these constraints by using a hierarchical classification of Landsat 7 ETM+ imagery to remove wet and well-vegetated areas prior to burned-area identification, and by using the thermal band data to improve the separation between wet and burned areas. These techniques resulted in good designation of burned areas, a reduction in the misclassification of unburned areas, and a refinement of the spatial distribution of areas burned in 2001. The approach should prove useful to practitioners seeking to manage fire in wetlands.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jane Southworth and Mike Binford from the Land Use and Environmental Change Institute and the Department of Geography at the University of Florida for their invaluable support and assistance in preparing this manuscript, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Field research was funded in part by grants from the Tropical Conservation and Development Program at the University of Florida, and by the Compton Foundation, California.

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  1. Land Use and Environmental Change Institute, University of Florida, 207 Weimer Hall, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Lin Cassidy

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Cassidy, L. Mapping the annual area burned in the wetlands of the Okavango panhandle using a hierarchical classification approach. Wetlands Ecol Manage 15, 253–268 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-006-9026-2

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