Results and Discussion 
The complete fire boundary was not clearly defined on either the 
enhanced imagery or on the digital classifications since areas of slightly 
damaged forest were indistinguishable from unburnt forest. This parallels 
the experience of the photointerpreters in preparing the map from the 
colour photography where the same intensity of fire was not clearly re- 
corded on the photographs. Myers (1978) maintains that much larger scales 
are necessary to identify those areas in a prescribed burn which have 
experienced a low intensity fire. Much of the slightly damaged forest at 
Mt Buffalo was burnt by low intensity fires resulting from backburning 
operations during suppression activities. The plotting of the fire 
boundary shown on the photointerpreted map required additional information 
by way of ground checking and details supplied by fire fighting personnel. 
It was possible by the digital approach to define ten classes. The 
signatures for the unnormalised data are set out in Table 1 and illustrated 
in Figure l. There were five classes of forest cover (unburnt), two 
classes of leaf scorch, one for areas with the crowns removed, one for 
cleared agricultural land and one for water bodies. 
On the enhanced visual image the boundaries of the severely and 
moderately damaged areas were improved in clarity particularly on the band 
7 image. A colour composite has not yet been prepared and an accuracy 
evaluation has yet to be performed quantitatively. 
Leaving aside the unburnt forest classes, which also include the 
slightly damaged type, the patterns of the moderately and severely damaged 
classes on the computer classification line printer output appear to 
visually match the patterns on the photointerpreted map reasonably well. 
When all classes were assigned specific colours and were displayed on the 
COMTAL colour image display device, the screen photographed on 35 mm colour 
film and the resulting slide projected onto the photointerpreted map, the 
match of the overall patterns was assessed as satisfactory. The normalised 
version of the classification, in which the effect of variation in il- 
lumination with slope and aspect was minimised, was judged to give a cleaner 
result and provided a better visual match with the photointerpreted map. 
Figure 2 illustrates the geometrically corrected classification as 
graphically displayed on the III COMp 80 device. For the sake of clarity, 
grouping of the unburnt forest classes into one class and also the two 
moderately damaged classes into one has been carried out in producing this 
result. 
Efforts devoted to digitally overlaying the classification and the 
photointerpreted map have been unsuccessful to date mainly because of the 
difficulty in identifying adequate control points to link the two digital 
images. The nomination of control points was attempted on the line printer 
output however when compared for position after warping functions were 
performed the resultant mean square deviations were too great (some as high 
as 7 pixels in both the x and y directions). 
These difficulties have rendered it impossible at this stage to provide 
a statement of the accuracy of the classification in the accepted confusion 
table manner in which percentage of agreement and errors of omission and 
commission are portrayed.