Detecting the Burned Area in Volcanic Region by Using Multitemporal Landsat-8 OLI (Case Study: Mt. Sumbing, Central Java)

Abstract

Biomass burning is one of the natural agents that most change terrestrial ecosystems and has a key ecological role in a huge piece of the Earth’s surface. Biomass burning has numerous socio-economic implications, particularly in developed countries where the developing urbanization of forested regions tends to increase accidents related with extraordinary fire occasions. Wildland fire mapping has been a subject vital for the international community over the recent two decades. Since fire is a major threat to forests and wooded areas in the tropical environment of Kalimantan, methodical regional fire observing is a need. Remote sensing methods are recognized as the efficient source of information for mapping burned areas from regional-national up to global scale. This study investigated the use of multitemporal Landsat-8 OLI (Operational Land Imager) data, to identify the burned area, in the tropical region of Indonesia, during 2019 fire season. A pair of Landsat-8 OLI, collected before and after fires, has been used to delineate the boundaries of sample location of burned area. Then, the difference of reflectance and Normalized Burn Ratio were analyzed. Fire incident causes landcover changes from vegetated land to bareland. This changes can affect the reflectance detected from Landsat-8 OLI. The result showed that biomass burning on volcanic region has caused high decreasing values on band 5 and there were high increasing on band 7. The NBR was better used to extracted burned area rather than NDVI or single spectral band. This method based on multitemporal optical data, creates a valuable tool for identifying and interpreting burned area following a fire event on volcanic region.