Post Fire Reforestation Detection of Siberian Boreal Forest with Radar Polarimetric and Multispectral Data Analysis

The method of forest restoration monitoring after wildfires is proposed. It is based on the joint use of ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 polarimetric radar data to assess the temporal dynamics of physical scattering mechanisms and the analysis of long time series of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) calculated with help of Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform. This made it possible to quantitatively analyze the process of post fire reforestation in terms of changes in the projective coverage and geometric dimensions of forest undergrowth. Such a new approach will make it possible further to take into account more accurately the role of boreal forests as one of the largest carbon stocks.