Location of the 2018 Kerlin Fire

The 2018 fire season in California was extreme. One of those fires, was the Kerlin Fire that started on September 4th in Trinity county near Hyampom (see marker on map). The fire engulfed approximately 2,000 acres of forest (see polygon on map).

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The Kerlin fire resulted in extremely altered vegetation in 2019

Here is a map of the difference in NDVI the year before the fire, and the year after. We can see that within the fire boundary much of the NDVI values are negative indicating a shift in productivity, likely correlated with burned vegetation. We may expect recovery within a few years--or longer.

Vegetation has not recovered after the Kerlin Fire within 3 years.

NDVI dropped by 0.17 inside the boundary the year after the Kerlin Fire. NDVI does not allow us to distinguish between forest growth and other vegetation, so the recovery we see may not be forest recovery, but is likely composed of understory species.

<Axes: title={'center': 'Difference in NDVI between inside and outside the Kerlin Fire boundary'}, xlabel='Year'>

Data Citation

ORNL DAAC 2018. MODIS and VIIRS Land Products Global Subsetting and Visualization Tool. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. Accessed September 09, 2023. Subset obtained for MOD13Q1 product at 40.6173635 N -123.4525362 W, time period: 2018, and subset size: 620.5 km x 620.5 km. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1379