Abstract

While remote sensing has been widely used to estimate vegetation biochemical and structural properties, relatively little work has systematically and experimentally linked vegetative fuel spectral reflectance to independently measured fuel combustibility, free-spreading fire behaviour, and fire emissions. This limits the development and validation of remote sensing products for operational wildland fire applications. We present a pilot-study evaluation of an experimental method that integrates imaging spectroscopy with free-spreading fires in a combustion wind tunnel to investigate relationships between wildland fuel spectral reflectance and combustibility, fire behaviour, and fire emissions. The pilot study used three common Australian fuels at two combustibility levels. Pre- and post-burn imaging spectroscopy observations (400–2500 nm) were collected during 26 experiments, alongside measurements of fuel biochemistry, calorimetry, moisture, rate of spread, combustion efficiency, and gaseous and particulate emissions. Statistically significant differences between fuel type and combustibility were found in fuel moisture, rate of spread, and emissions, with corresponding differences evident in the spectral signatures. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) indicated that pre-fire spectral information was informative for predicting several fire behaviour and emissions metrics. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology and provide a foundation for extending it to a wider range of wildland fuels. Data generated using this methodology have the potential to improve interpretation of remote sensing datasets and inform the design of future satellite instruments, with potential applications in assessing fuel condition, predicting fire behaviour, and estimating wildland fire emissions.

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