Informing Sustainable Forest Management: Remote Sensing Strategies for Assessing Soil Disturbance after Wildfire and Salvage Logging

Wildfires have nearly become a guaranteed annual event in most western National Forests. Severe fire effects can be mitigated with a goal of minimizing the hydrologic response and promoting soil and vegetation recovery towards the pre-disturbance condition. Sometimes, post-fire actions include salvage logging to recover timber value and to remove excess fuels. Salvage logging was conducted after three large wildfires on the Lolo National Forest in Montana, USA, between 2017 and 2019. We evaluated detrimental soil disturbance (DSD) on seven units that were burned at low, moderate, and high soil burn severity in 2022, three to five years after the logging occurred. We found a range of exposed soil of 5%–25% and DSD from 3% to 20%, and these values were significantly correlated at r = 0.88. Very-high-resolution WorldView-2 imagery that coincided with the field campaign was used to calculate Normal Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) across the salvaged areas; we found that NDVI values were significantly correlated to DSD at r = 0.87. We were able to further examine this relationship and determined NDVI threshold values that corresponded to high-DSD areas, as well as develop a model to estimate the contributions of equipment type, seasonality, topography, and burn severity to DSD. A decision-making tool which combines these factors and NDVI is presented to support land managers in planning, evaluating, and monitoring disturbance from post-fire salvage logging.