Monitoring Post-Fire Recovery of Chaparral and Conifer Species Using Field Surveys and Landsat Time Series

Recovery trajectories derived from remote sensing data are widely used to monitor ecosystem recovery after disturbance events, but these trajectories are often retrieved without a precise understanding of the land cover within a scene. As a result, the sources of variability in post-disturbance recovery trajectories are poorly understood. In this study, we monitored the recovery of chaparral and conifer species following the 2007 Zaca Fire, which burned 97,270 ha in Santa Barbara County, California. We combined field survey data with two time series remote sensing products: the relative delta normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) and green vegetation (GV) fractions derived from spectral mixture analysis. Recovery trajectories were retrieved for stands dominated by six different chaparral species. We also retrieved recovery trajectories for stands of mixed conifer forest. We found that the two remote sensing products were equally effective at mapping vegetation cover across the burn scar. The GV fractions (r(78) = 0.552, p < 0.001) and normalized burn ratio (r(78) = 0.555, p < 0.001) had nearly identical correlations with ground reference data of green vegetation cover. Recovery of the chaparral species was substantially affected by the 2011–2017 California drought. GV fractions for the chaparral species generally declined between 2011 and 2016. Physiological responses to fire and drought were important sources of variability between the species. The conifer stands did not exhibit a drought signal that was directly correlated with annual precipitation, but the drought likely delayed the return to pre-fire conditions. As of 2018, 545 of the 756 conifer stands had not recovered to their pre-fire GV fractions. Spatial and temporal variation in species composition were important sources of spectral variability in the chaparral and conifer stands. The chaparral stands in particular had highly heterogeneous species composition. Dominant species accounted for between 30% and 53% of the land cover in the surveyed chaparral patches, so non-dominant land cover types strongly influenced remote sensing signals. Our study reveals that prolonged drought can delay or alter the post-fire recovery of Mediterranean ecosystems. It is also the first study to critically examine how fine-scale variability in land cover affects time series remote sensing analyses.