Monitoring Vegetation Restoration after Wildfires in Typical Boreal Forests Based on Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data

Wildfires have become the primary mechanism for disturbing boreal forests. An adequate understanding of the restoration trend of forests after wildfires can help to develop forest recovery and protection measures. In this study, we employed Landsat 5 TM and MODIS data with vegetation area-series data to compare and assess the restoration of vegetation in the last 20 years after wildfires in the Daxinganling. The results show that (1) all vegetation types showed significant recovery trends in both burned zones (BZ) and unburned zones (UNBZ); (2) the rates of deciduous needleleaf forest (DNF) and mixed forest (MF) were slightly higher in UNBZ than in BZ, but the recovery rate of deciduous broadleaf forest (DBF) in BZ reached 156.5km
²
/a, which was higher than its rate in UNBZ; (3) DNF and MF had the same main period and existed in the same time scale with similar recovery periods, DBF has a 4-year period in BZ at a 6-year time scale, which represents DBF’s short recovery period and sharp fluctuations in this region. These results have important reference value for monitoring the restoration of boreal forest vegetation and ecological environmental protection after wildfires.