1. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
An assessment of correlation between vegetation parameters measured on the ground and endmember fractions from remotely sensed data of varying spatial resolution
Seth Peterson
Department of Geography,
University of California, Santa Barbara

2. Acknowledgements:
USFS - 4 years of funding

3. Presentation Overview
1) Fire / fuel loads
2) SMA
3) Sample Endmember fractions
4) MESMA
5) Sample Endmember fraction / biomass correlations

4. Why is fire important? Fuel loads have increased
Urban encroachment into wildlands
These processes may be different for different ecosystems (study sites are in 5 western states)

5. How can we study fire fuel loads?
Massive amounts of ground-based sampling
Small, well-designed ground-based studies to calibrate large area remotely sensed scenes
- Correlate different indices and products from image processing techniques with ground-based data

6. Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA)
Expresses pixel values as mixtures of the scene components,
called endmembers (EMs)
Typical EMs used are:
green vegetation (GV -- e.g. green leaves)
nonphotosynthetic vegetation (NPV -- e.g. bark, branches, litter)
rocks, soils
shade

7. GV
NPV
Landsat TM imagery
for MCAS Miramar
with Endmember
fraction images
Soil
Shade

8. The mixed pixel problem / Endmember analysisGV
Soil
NPV
ADAR data, 1 m pixels
Landsat TM data, 30 m pixels

9. GV soil soil NPV shade shade GV
Feature space plots for the MCAS Miramar
Landsat TM scene, with approximate EM locations GV
soil
shade GV
soil
NPV
shade
Band 4
Band 7
Band 3
Band 4

10. Multiple Endmember SMA (MESMA)
- Allows for flexibility in the number of EMs used to model each pixel
- Allows for flexibility in the type of EMs used to model each pixel
Modeled EM fractions will be most accurate when the fewest,
most appropriate EMs are used to model each pixel
GV_1
GV_2
soil_1
soil_2
NPV_1
NPV_2
shade_photo
shade_phyto
Band 4
Band 7

11. EM Fractions vs. time for stands of chamise chaparralGV
NPV
Soil
Shade

12. Summary
Fire is a problem
Remote Sensing is one way to look at it