Remote Sensing of Forest Burnt Area, Burn Severity, and Post-Fire Recovery: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The research “Remote Sensing of Forest Burnt Area: a Review” brings a review of studies that combined remote sensing techniques with fires in forest areas.

The research has great relevance to the theme, the introduction is clear and precise, as are the research objectives. The methodology proved to be adequate, and the results bring a compilation of the main characteristics of the analyzed studies, with good writing and logical sequence. I bring some points that can be observed by the authors especially for the discussions.

The authors could briefly survey the representativeness of research by biome. Ex. Total area of tropical forests x total articles. Since, for example, there is a low predominance of research in tropical forests in South America and Africa and it was only briefly explored in the conclusion.

Emphasize the importance of the study for the implementation of Environmental management policies.

L458 . MTBS - highlight that it is a program at national level

L636- Sentinel*

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

General Comments:

         This study summarized the current remote sensing techniques in the application of forest burned area, burned severity, and post-fire recovery. Based on the collection of a lot of literature, the article analyzed the characteristics of published papers and elaborated on the different remote sensing applications in burned area, burned severity, and post-fire recovery in terms of data source, spectral indices, and classification methods etc. Generally, this review proposed an up-to-date summary of articles published over the past 20 years, which provided a reference for future research. However, the manuscript hierarchy is chaotic, and the writing logic still needs to be improved. The major comments are categorized according to the structure hierarchy of manuscript:

Major comments:

Line 2: The title of this article is only focused on the burned area, but the burned severity and post-fire recovery are also mentioned in the manuscript. This is not reflected in the title of the article.

There are many grammatical errors, and only a small proportion of these are listed below. Please check and revise the grammatical errors in the whole manuscript.

Line 24: replace " ecological zooning" with " ecological zoning "

Line 27: replace " to" with "for "

Line34: replace " event " with "events "; replace " structure " with " the structure "

Line65: remove “of”

Line69: replace " time span " with "period "

Line84: replace " interests to " with " interest in "

Line99: replace " consistent " with " consistent with"

Line100: replace " od " with " of"

Line109: replace " type " with " types"

Line116: remove “a”

Line 182: replace " on estimation" with " to the estimation"; replace " burned forest area" with " forest burned area"

Line 273: replace " describing" with " described"

Line 300: remove “been”

Line 340: “can facilitate for identifying patterns of burned areas” could be rewritten to “can facilitate the identification of burned area patterns”

Line417: replace " need in" with " a need for"

Line 445: replace "Another" with " other"

Line 531: replace "used" with " use"

Line 564: insert "an" before " indispensable"

Line 642: replace " time period " with " period "

Line 734: remove “on”

Line 774: insert "," after" turn"

1. Introduction:

Line 44-55: It is redundant to repeatedly emphasize the importance of wildfire in global forest ecosystems in a new paragraph. Combined with the analysis contents in the manuscript, the importance of burned area, burned severity, and post-fire recovery studies could be described in this paragraph.

Line 56-64: The application of remote sensing techniques in forest fire ecology is the core content of the manuscript. However, the description of this part in the introduction is too general. I think supplementary introductions are needed for specific remote sensing applications.

Line 70: “examples of remote sensing techniques for the burnt forest area estimations.” could be replaced with “summarized the application of remote sensing techniques for the forest burned area, burned severity and post-fire recovery.”

2. Materials and Methods:

Line 134-330: I might be confused about the writing structure in this manuscript. The contents in the section 2.3 might not be suitable described in the section 2. “Materials and Methods” should provide the description of dataset and the general framework of research. However, the contents of section 2.3 are just listed the research trends of published papers, and some of the results might not relate to the next section. Therefore, I suggested that these different characteristic analyses of published papers could be displayed in the corresponding section below. Besides, it is possible ambiguity that the topic of collected literature is described as remote sensing of forest burned area (BA) which is the same word as the subtopic of “burn area (BA) mapping”.

Line 110: In order to the general understanding for reader, a general framework figure of discussed topics in this review is needed.

3. Results and discussions:

Line507, Line 673: The Hierarchical structure in section 3 is confusing. It is not necessary to separately list two sections: “BA and BS mapping using active RS sensors” and “Classification of BA and BS” because these are part of the contents of burned area mapping and burned severity assessment. Thus, these contents could be combined with sections 3.1 and 3.2. Besides, the logical relationship between paragraphs is confusing. I suggest that the tertiary heading (i.e. 3.1.1, 3.1.2…) could be added inder secondary heading to summarize research trends in different aspects.

Line429-447: A detailed introduction of field-based burned severity (CBI, GeoCBI) might be redundant.

Line647: In section 3.5.1, the fraction images from MESMA/SMA analysis are only small kinds of variables in BS and BA classification. This content can be considered combined with other features such as spectral indices (e.g. NBR, NDVI), biophysical variables (e.g. LAI, FAPAR), terrain variables, and variables calculated from the active sensor (e.g. SAR, LiDAR).

Besides, the author lists too many examples of other’s research findings in this section (e.g. Line472-494), making it difficult for the reader to directly obtain valuable information. The more direct expression can be achieved by combining summative charts.

4. Conclusions and research perspectives:

Line807-822: The future research perspectives are incomplete in this section. I suggest that the future perspective can be illustrated from the three application directions explored in this manuscript.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Reviewer Comments:

      The logical structure of this manuscript has been greatly improved after the modifications. It is great to see the most of the comments have been accepted and revised. I think this version of manuscript has been enough to be published.