Abstract

The Cerro Grande Fire of May 2000 burned approximately 43,000 acres in the eastern Jemez Mountains in the vicinity of Los Alamos, New Mexico. BAER (Burned Area Emergency Response) expenditures exceeded 14 million dollars on immediate post-fire treatments. Remote sensing was used to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of post-fire treatment prescriptions as a cost-effective tool at the landscape scale. We performed a multi-temporal normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) analysis based on Landsat imagery acquired on several anniversary dates between 1999 and 2005. An assessment of vegetation regeneration within treatment areas was conducted by comparing inter-annual NDVI values using the normalized regeneration index (NRI). The NRI results show that certain BAER treatments helped to enhance vegetative cover over the course of our monitoring. The quickest vegetation regeneration occurred in the unit with the highest proportion of acres treated for the purpose of establishing immediate ground cover through mulching and seeding. Fire History of the Jemez Mountains