Abstract
Tropical peat swamp forests, found mainly in Southeast Asia, have been threatened by recurring El Niño fires. Repeated burnings form a complex and heterogeneous landscape comprising a mosaic of burned patches of different fire frequencies, requiring fine-scale assessment to understand their impact. We examined the impact of the El Niño fires of 1998 and 2003 on a tropical peat swamp forest in northern Borneo, with the combined use of high and very high-resolution satellite images. Object-based and pixel-based classifications were compared to classify a QuickBird image. Burned patches of different fire frequencies were derived based on unsupervised classification of the principal components of multitemporal Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) data. The results show that the object-based classification was more accurate than the pixel-based classification for generating a detailed land cover map. Fire frequency had a severe impact on the number of burned patches and the residual forest cover. Larger patch area retained more residual forest cover for the burned patches. Forest structure of burned-twice patches was more severely altered compared to burned-once patches. Two burned-once patches had a relatively promising recovery potential by natural regeneration due to higher residual forest cover, a vast number of large trees, and aboveground biomass. Except for the largest patch, rehabilitation seemed inevitable for burned-twice patches. This approach can be applied to assess the impact of multiple fires on other forest types for better post-fire forest management.
Highlights
IntroductionTropical peat swamp forests are a complex ecosystem that holds an enormous amount of carbon compared to the biomass of the entire Amazon [1,2]
We reported the relationship between the total area and residual forest cover of the burned patches, presented forest structure variables measured in the field by fire frequency, and evaluated the characteristics of the burned patches
Tropical peat swamp forests are threatened by recurring El Niño-related fires, creating a mosaic of burned patches with different fire histories
Summary
Tropical peat swamp forests are a complex ecosystem that holds an enormous amount of carbon compared to the biomass of the entire Amazon [1,2]. These forests are found mainly in Southeast Asia [3], where farmers routinely use fire to clear the land for agricultural purposes [4]. During a prolonged El Niño drought, fires started for cultivation can quickly spread into severe fires, even in the wet tropics [5]. Peat swamp forests are susceptible to fires, as their peat layer contains partially decomposed plant material that is highly flammable in a drought.
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