Discrimination of vegetational patterns in burned and unburned areas

Time series of satellite SPOT-VEGETATION Normalized Difference of Vegetation Index (NDVI) data from 1998 to 2003 is analyzed in order to evaluate the effect of fire-related vegetational variability in the time dynamics of shrub-land in Italy. We use the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), which permits the detection of persistent properties in nonstationary signal fluctuations. We analyze two shrub-land sites, fire-unaffected and fire-affected, respectively. Our findings reveal that fires contribute to the increase of the persistence in the dynamics of vegetation of shrub-lands. This result discloses a new perspective in characterizing vegetational behavioral trends