Background

Prescribed fire is vital for fuel reduction and ecological restoration, but the effectiveness and fine-scale interactions are poorly understood.

Aims

We developed methods for processing uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) imagery into spatially explicit pyrometrics, including measurements of fuel consumption, rate of spread, and residence time to quantitatively measure three prescribed fires.

Methods

We collected infrared (IR) imagery continuously (0.2 Hz) over prescribed burns and one experimental calibration burn, capturing fire progression and combustion for multiple hours.

Key results

Pyrometrics were successfully extracted from UAS-IR imagery with sufficient spatiotemporal resolution to effectively measure and differentiate between fires. UAS-IR fuel consumption correlated with weight-based measurements of 10 1-m² experimental burn plots, validating our approach to estimating consumption with a cost-effective UAS-IR sensor (R² = 0.99; RMSE = 0.38 kg m⁻²).

Conclusions

Our findings demonstrate UAS-IR pyrometrics are an accurate approach to monitoring fire behaviour and effects, such as measurements of consumption. Prescribed fire is a fine-scale process; a ground sampling distance of <2.3 m² is recommended. Additional research is needed to validate other derived measurements.

Implications

Refined fire monitoring coupled with refined objectives will be pivotal in informing fire management of best practices, justifying the use of prescribed fire and providing quantitative feedback in an uncertain environment.

Keywords: fire effects, fire radiative energy (FRE), fire radiative power (FRP), fire rate of spread, fuel consumption, image stabilisation, thermal imagery, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS).