Exploring the Spatio-temporal characteristics of vegetative wildfire damage and recovery in the African World Natural Heritage Sites

Abstract

World Natural Heritage Sites (WNHSs) are recognized as precious gifts from nature, yet are inevitably influenced by natural disasters. Exploring the vegetation damage and recovery in WNHSs is beneficial for understanding the influences induced by nature disasters, and is thus crucial for eco-environment planning and protection. However, most previous studies have focused only on one or a few specific WNHSs. This study, by exploring the spatio-temporal characteristics of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) trend (NDVIT), disaster vegetation damage index (DVDI) and vegetation recovery rate (VRR) from 2001 to 2020 in the selected sites, aims to reveal the effects of wildfire on the vegetation in the African WNHSs. The results illustrate that: (1) 83.4% of the burned areas in the selected African WNHSs have displayed an increasing trends in NDVI since the 21st century, while the variations in NDVIT for these WNHSs are different (sites (d) and (e) show the largest increase, while sites (f) and (g) show the largest decrease); (2) though vegetation damage induced by fires differ from one WNHS to another in the eight selected WNHSs, wildfires greatly damaged the vegetation in these WNHSs; (3) the VRR reached 40% −70%, with a mean value of 56.9% in the eight selected WNHSs within one year after a wildfires, which illustrates that the vegetation in most areas has an outstanding self-recovery abilities; (4) the PCCs of DVDI and NDVIT, and of DVDI and VRR are negatively significant, indicating wildfires strongly influence vegetation growth and recovery. acquire the trends for vegetation damage induced by fires and its recovery at these sites from 2001 to 2020. The study demonstrates that remote sensing approach can be applied to measure the influence of wildfire damage and the recovery of vegetation in WHNSs and other similar regions