Natural Fires in the Steppe Regions of Russia: Causing Factors and Detection Experience

Abstract

Wildfires are a typical phenomenon for steppe regions. However, their causes, scale, and ecological consequences have not been sufficiently studied. The study aims to identify the spatial and temporal patterns of the spread of steppe fires based on remote sensing data analysis. When choosing the study territory, we considered the administrative-territorial principle (Orenburg region and municipalities). This principle contributes to assessing the importance of individual indicators of agricultural production in the formation of the pyrological situation. We present a geographic information system database of fire areas by visually decoding satellite images representing the study region and surrounding areas in 2010 and in a series of key locations during 1984–2017. Based on indirect indicators, we prove that the most common cause of wildfires is agricultural areas of grass fires, which are used to improve the forage quality of pastures and facilitate arable land cultivation. Despite the legislative ban, grass fires have been and remain almost a traditional way of steppe nature management. Besides, we reveal that archival data on thermal anomalies has a limited number of tasks to be solved. However, this data is a valuable source of information about fires. Moreover, we prove the trend of activation of steppe fires. Since the 1990s, there was an opinion that the systemic crisis in agriculture (especially in animal husbandry) is the most significant factor of pyrogenic danger.