Spectral Library: Eastern Washington

An objective of this Assessing Burn Severity project was to form a spectral library of endmembers of the major surface components encountered on the wildfires we sampled in western Montana and eastern Washington mixed conifer forests, southern California chaparral, and interior Alaska spruce forest. In eastern Washington, we concentrated our spectral endmember collection on vegetation types: 

  1. native green vegetation
  2. introduced green vegetation
  3. noxious green vegetation
  4. non-photosynthetic vegetation

We used the USDA PLANTS database (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service [USDA NRCS]. 2015. The PLANTS Database [Online]. National Plant Data Team. Greensboro, NC. Available: https://plants.usda.gov) to classify species as native, introduced, or noxious. A digital photo of the plant material, a graph of the plants spectral reflectance, and a downloadable ASCII flie of the actual spectrum is provided. We encourage users to download spectra for remote image analysis within these regions and vegetation types, both for burn severity and other applications.