Improving thematic mapper based classification of wildfire induced vegetation mortality

In many areas suppression of wildfire has produced fuel accumulations that pre-dispose forests to undesirable fire behavior. Image processing techniques can be used to combine different elements of terrain data into a single composite image. This composite terrain image is used to improve the accuracy of a supervised classification of expected vegetation mortality in a 20, 000 acre forest fire in the Cibola National Forest in New Mexico. Error matrices are produced that indicate that combining TM and terrain data provides a 40% improvement in accuracy compared to TM data alone. Computer-assisted mapping of observed and potential patterns of wildfire can provide forest managers cost-effective tools for wildfire planning and ecosystem management.