Wildfire is a natural and necessary process which causes both devastation and regeneration to forested landscapes. One such event, the Duck Lake Fire, occurred in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan in the United States in 2012. The burn area is overseen by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) and encompasses approximately 8900 ha (21,000 acres) near the mouth of the Two Hearted River on the south shore of Lake Superior. After the fire, replanting by the MDNR and natural regeneration has taken place. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) imagery of ten 1-ha study plots were collected via a MicaSense Red Edge camera simultaneously capturing images in the Red, Green, Blue, Red Edge and NIR bands. Images were collected at 60 meters altitude with platform velocity of 6 m/s. Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) in eCognnition Developer was conducted to assess the regrowth of jack pine in the Duck Lake forest and answer three questions: What is the level of accuracy that can be achieved via GEOBIA for detecting young jack pine saplings? How does the use of the Red Edge (RE) spectral band affect image classification accuracy? How does seasonal change affect the accuracy that can is achieved by the UAS and GEOBIA method? GEOBIA classification accuracies ranged from 59.5-97.5% with the NIR-R band combination performing the best overall and RE performing the worst. An overall increase in accuracy was observed as the season progressed with the highest average accuracy in time three (T3) at 78.4% across all bands.
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