NDVI Baseline

Many post-fire recovery plans seek to return the burned landscape to pre-fire conditions. This presents a challenge however as pre-fire conditions may not be well known especially across the large burned areas of a mega-fire. Furthermore, pre-fire conditions may describe a landscape dominated by invasive annual grasses like cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum). In this case, the burned area should not be returned to pre-fire conditions but rather to a more historically natural condition. These conditions may be documented in ecological site reports (cf., USDA NRCS STATSGO data) and/or LANDFIRE Biophysical Setting (BPS) data.

To help land managers understand the pre-fire condition of vegetation, the NASA RECOVER DSS developed the NDVI Baseline capability. The NDVI Baseline is a long-term library of Landsat 8 OLI NDVI imagery across the entire western United States. This seamless and comprehensive collection contains over 18,000 scenes and over 1.1 billion pixels. Extracting data from this massive dataset can be done in two ways:

1. Use the online app to extract summary statistics for individual points. Click here to use the NDVI Baseline app.
2. Use ArcGIS Pro desktop software to extract point profiles or polygon data across the entire temporal range of available data. Click here to access the ArcGIS Pro tutorial.

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