Detection of Change in Forest Fire Areas with SENTİNEL-2 Satellite Images
Project no. 21591 · Status: Kapanmış · 2020
Summary
The forest is an ecosystem that is formed not only by trees but also by physical environmental factors such as soil, air, water and temperature, as well as a very large living community such as other plants, animals and microorganisms. These elements and events that make up forests are in a continuous relationship and interaction with each other. In this context, forest is defined as an ecosystem consisting of many plant and animal populations. In addition, they have an extremely important place for the entire ecosystem in terms of ensuring social and environmental balance. Due to the effects and consequences of forest fires, it is considered among the major natural disasters all over the world. When we look at the forest fires in our country, it is observed that there has been a significant increase in the number of fires in parallel with the population increase in recent years, although they have a variable nature. While these events increase the effectiveness of factors such as erosion, landslides, desertification, which cause soil loss, they also cause the natural cycle to deteriorate. In addition, determining the areas of forests damaged after fires, monitoring and determining the changes in vegetation cover are of great importance in terms of land management. Detection of burnt areas caused by forest fires is generally made by physical control and measurement methods. However, this method is costly in terms of time and economy. Another way to detect burnt areas is detection of burned areas from satellite images. In this study, the possibilities of using Sentinel-2 satellite images in determining forest fire areas were investigated. In addition, it is aimed to determine the changes in past and recent satellite data spatially by using different indices in order to determine the areas affected by fire and the burning intensity in large areas.