A Comparison and Fusion of Radar and Optical Data for the Detection of the Edale 2008 Burn Scar in the Peak District National Park

Systematic detection and monitoring of moorland wildfires is essential to conservation groups such as Moors for the Future to understand the extent of damage and to monitor natural post-fire recovery or peatland restoration measures. The collection of burn scar perimeter data and vegetation recovery in the field is labour-intensive and time-consuming, limiting the spatial coverage of regular monitoring. The large (7 km2) Bleaklow 2003 burn scar was successfully detected by C-band SAR data in the Peak District National Park for up to 71 days post-fire (Millin-Chalabi et al., 2014). With the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014 and Sentinel-1B due in 2016, regular monitoring of moorland areas for burn scar detection using SAR is now on the horizon. Moorland areas are regularly covered by cloud, however, data fusion of optical and radar data will be explored for burn scar area enhancement. The aim of this research is to use multi-temporal and multi-sensor techniques to compare and contrast the ability of optical and radar data to detect the smaller Edale 2008 burn scar of 0.10 km2. We present a time series of C-band (ASAR and ERS-2) and L-band (PALSAR) data and compare burn scar detection using radar with Landsat 7 scenes.