Fort Collins Node
Ethiopia Ecological Forecasting
Mapping Fire History in Ethiopia with a 42-Year Landsat Time Series

>> CHANDRA: Ethiopia's Bale Mountains contain the largest tropical alpine ecosystem in Africa. Due to their unique environment, these mountains are a biodiversity hotspot, with more endemic animal species than any other terrestrial habitat on the planet. The Bale Mountain National Park is currently home to over 40,000 people, many of whom are agro-pastoralists who rely on the region's natural resources for their livelihoods. The use of intentional burning to enhance livestock forage production is a traditional form of land management that has been practiced in these mountains for thousands of years.  However, rapid growth in human and livestock populations have generated concerns among park managers that increases in the frequency and extent of fires could lead to environmental degradation, loss of wildlife habitat, and a reduced ability to meet human needs in the region. The Murulle Foundation is working with local park managers and officials in the Bale Mountains to help create sustainable environmental policies.

>> NICHOLAS: The goals of the Murulle Foundation for this specific project are really just to get a better understanding of the fire history and fire frequency in the Bale Mountains. There's not a lot of understanding about how fire behaves on that landscape.  We know that fires have been a part of that landscape for thousands of years, and this has largely been anthropogenic either through accidental ignitions through harvesting honey or intentional to burn maybe Erica shrub to increase forage habitat for their livestock. It's great to partner with folks like NASA DEVELOP to help fill those gaps and really support what we're trying to do in Ethiopia. 

>> STEPHEN: DEVELOP has partnered with The Murulle Foundation to quantify fire extent and distribution in the Bale Mountains, in order to provide land managers with the most comprehensive fire history for this region to date. NASA Earth Observations used in this project include data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Terra and Aqua, Landsat 1,3,and 5, Landsat 7 and Landsat 8.  This made use of the full Landsat record, but it also posed new challenges for how to seamlessly integrate data from several different satellites and sensors.
 
>> KELLY: To address these challenges, the team used LandsatLinkr, an open source software package that calibrates and organizes imagery across Landsat sensors and scenes. For each scene, LandsatLinkr also generates a tasseled cap transformation, which can be compared across all Landsat sensors. The tasseled cap produces indices of brightness, greenness and wetness across the landscape, which can be composited to visualize changes and disturbances from year to year. The tasseled cap time series was supplemented by a quantitative assessment of burned areas. For each scene, missing data from scan line errors were interpolated, cloudy pixels were removed, and a normalized burn ratio was derived and thresholded to extract burned patches. 

>> DARIN: These analyses produced an aggregated map of fires from the entire available Landsat archive. Results were in agreement with data from the literature and the MODIS burned area product. Furthermore, they documented fire history at a finer spatial resolution, and expanded the existing temporal record, which will enhance future studies of fire dynamics and social-ecological systems in the Bale Mountains.

>> NICHOLAS: So the maps that are provided by NASA DEVELOP are going to be great because the maps provide this really unique, kind of universal communication tool.  So we work in Ethiopia that has cultural and language barriers.  Maps really transcend those barriers and are able to effectively communicate different management strategies and solutions to some of our Ethiopian partners that work in natural resources.