Over the past decades, the great technological advances made in airborne and space sensors have led to a significant improvement of the remote sensing methods and techniques used for studying worldwide natural ecosystem disturbances. Generally, optical sensors are chosen for investigating landscapes transformation, however, this technology requires certain technical and environmental conditions (sunlight, no cloud-coverage) which are problematic for monitoring some regions of the world.
In response to this challenge, this research aims to highlight the capabilities of Synthetic Aperture Radar - SAR satellite sensors for detecting disturbances in Mediterranean forests due to fire events. We are exploring three different methodologies: 1. Monitoring image intensity changes in dense time series of radar data; 2. We are investigating soil moisture changes after the fire that can be detected in intensities of radar images; 3. We are testing novel polarimetric SAR change detectors that are able to extract more information from polarimetric data (intensities and cross-correlations between polarimetric channels). All the procedures in this project were developed by using Co & Cross polarised radar satellite data acquired by the ESA-Sentinel-1 system in C-band, using the Doñana national park (Spain) forest fire event in June-July 2017 as a case study
