Interpretation of high-resolution imagery for detecting vegetation cover composition change after fuels reduction treatments in woodlands ☆

Abstract The use of very high resolution (VHR; ground sampling distances  r between 0.47 and 0.89), but generally poorer for herbaceous vegetation and litter ( r between 0.18 and 0.81) likely due to differences in image quality by year and the difficulty in discriminating fine vegetation and litter in imagery. Our results show that image interpretation to detect vegetation changes has utility for monitoring fuels reduction treatments in terms of woody vegetation and no-vegetation classes. The benefits of this technique are that it provides objective and repeatable measurements of site conditions that could be implemented relatively inexpensively and easily without the need for highly specialized software or technical expertise. Perhaps the biggest limitations of image interpretation to monitoring fuels treatments are challenges in estimating litter and herbaceous vegetation cover and the sensitivity of herbaceous cover estimates to image quality and shadowing.