Abstract
Wildfires are currently one of the most important environmental problems, as they cause disturbance in ecosystems generating environmental, economic and social costs. The Sentinel-2 from Copernicus Program (Sentinel satellites) offers a great tool for post-fire monitoring. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the potential of Sentinel-2 in a peculiar mountainous landscape by measuring and identifying the burned areas and monitor the short-term response of the vegetation in different ‘burn severity’ classes. A Sentinel-2 dataset was created, and pre-processing operations were performed. Relativized Burn Ratio (RBR) was calculated to identify ‘burn scar’ and discriminate the ‘burn severity’ classes. A two-year monitoring was carried out with areas identified based on different severity classes, using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to investigate the short-term vegetation dynamics of the burned habitats; habitats refer to Annex I of the European Directive 92/43/EEC. The study area is located in ‘Campo Imperatore’ within the Gran Sasso – Monti della Laga National Park (central Italy). The first important result was the identification and quantification of the area affected by fire. The RBR allowed us to identify even the less damaged habitats with high accuracy. The survey highlighted the importance of these Open-source tools for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of fires and the short-term assessment of vegetation recovery dynamics. The information gathered by this type of monitoring can be used by decision-makers both for emergency management and for possible environmental restoration of the burned areas.
Highlights
Wildfires are currently one of the most important environmental problems as they cause disturbances in ecosystems generating environmental, economic and social costs (Viana-Soto et al 2017)
Sensors like Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) with spatial resolutions between 300 m and 1 km are generally used for these purposes (Mouillot et al 2014)
Fire is an important disturbance process in many ecosystems, e.g. Mediterranean ecosystems (Keeley et al 2011), but its intensity and frequency are altered by humans in many areas as a result of land use change (Bucini and Lambin 2002) or, as in the present study, of an accidental fire
Summary
Wildfires are currently one of the most important environmental problems as they cause disturbances in ecosystems generating environmental, economic and social costs (Viana-Soto et al 2017). Remote sensing has been used to monitor active fires and burned areas at the global and national scale (Giglio et al 1999; Alonso-Canas and Chuvieco 2015; de Carvalho Júnior et al 2015). Sensors like Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) with spatial resolutions between 300 m and 1 km are generally used for these purposes (Mouillot et al 2014). Their daily revisit cycle is useful to capture active fire signatures or burn scars, the relatively coarse spatial resolution causes underestimations in case of burned area small extent.
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