Remote sensing assessment of wildfire severity and early vegetation recovery in a Mediterranean mountain landscape (NW Spain)

Wildfire severity assessment and vegetation recovery monitoring are essential for sustainable forest management, particularly in Mediterranean mountain ecosystems increasingly affected by climate change. This study evaluates the severity and short-term regeneration of vegetation following the July 2022 fire in Montes de Valdueza (Ponferrada, Spain), using Landsat 8 OLI imagery and two spectral indices: differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and differenced Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (dNDVI). Burn severity was classified into four categories, validated against PlanetScope high-resolution imagery as ground truth. The classification achieved an overall accuracy of 87.2% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.83, indicating strong agreement. Moderate severity dominated the burned area (69.4%), followed by low severity (22.8%). Vegetation recovery analysis conducted eight months after the fire revealed that 49.0% of the area showed low vegetation loss, 26.8% remained unchanged, and 7.8% experienced moderate loss. These findings highlight the resilience of shrub-dominated Mediterranean mountain landscapes and demonstrate the viability of low-cost remote sensing approaches for post-fire monitoring. The methodology provides replicable tools for managers to design long-term protocols that integrate vulnerability and resilience assessments in fire-prone regions.