Google Earth Engine Based Approach for Finding Fire Locations and Burned Areas in Muğla, Turkey

Abstract

Forests are considered as one of the main sources of biodiversity. Forest fires caused by various reasons pose a high risk in terms of biodiversity. Therefore, mapping of fire zones is of great importance in determining the damage caused by the fire, managing the fire process, and planning the interventions in the fire zone. Although remote sensing is a fast and cost-effective methodology for mapping fire zones, the implementation of the remote sensing methodologies is problematic in some respects. The web-based Google Earth Engine makes possible to access the satellite imagery and process the imagery easily. The research area of this study is Muğla, Turkey in where many forest fires broke out in 2021 summer. This study provides an implementation of normalized burn ratio which is widely used to highlight burned areas on Google Earth Engine platform. Both vector data and satellite images were used in the study. The vector data is in the shape file format and was uploaded to the Google Earth Engine platform as a table. The Sentinel-2 imagery was used to calculate normalized burn ratio. The satellite imagery was clipped using the table data. The difference pre-fire and post-fire images was calculated, and the classes were assigned to the pixels according to the normalized burn ratio ranges. The study indicates that finding the burned areas and constructing the burn severity levels can be realized in 1.32 minutes on Google Earth Engine platform.