Ground-cover and fire monitoring in Queensland's arid and semi-arid rangelands

Abstract

Arid and semi-arid rangelands cover a large proportion of the State of Queensland. The remote sensing team of the Queensland Centre for Climate Applications is currently developing operational methods for monitoring two very important indicators of rangeland condition: ground-cover and fire. The monitoring needs for these two indicators are very different. The high frequency, regional scale spatial resolution provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer imagery, together with its combination of thermal and reflective bands is ideal for monitoring active fires (visible for maybe only a few hours) and firescars (often visible for only a few weeks). In contrast, Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) provides less frequent cover-age but more spatial detail. Methods are being developed to use Landsat TM imagery to estimate ground-cover and identify trends in land condition, both spatially and temporally, in Queensland's rangelands.