Challenges on fire severity assessment in Indonesia: A vegetation diversity changes perspective

Abstract

Fire severity assessment plays a significant role in post-fire management, which relates to burned area recovery, economic valuation, and law enforcement. Although various fire severity assessments have been conducted in several burned areas in Indonesia, the standardized method seems limited. This study aims to define criteria and indicators for forest and land fire severity assessment based on systematic reviews using a text mining approach. Systematic reviews on peer-reviewed journal articles related to forest fire severity published in 2010-2021 from Google Scholar source was conducted using Publish or Perish application using keywords of forest fire, severity, criteria, indicator, vegetation, soil, wildlife, living trees, mortality, survival, a burned area, abundance with no citations nor patents included. The linkage among forest fire severity related terms was analyzed using the VOSviewer application, which is based on a text mining approach to identify the most common criteria and indicators for fire severity assessment. The study revealed that there are 991 articles published fits to the keywords, of which 269 articles close related to forest fire severity from 75 peer-reviewed journals. Text mining analyses resulted in 4 clusters of forest fire severity related terms. The criteria commonly used for forest fire severity assessment are vegetation and soil, while the options for indicators including diversity, abundance, forest structure, tree mortality, and burn depth. These criteria and indicators are recommended for formulating forest fire severity assessment standard methods in Indonesia.