Forest Fire Burnt Assessment Using Different Indices for Tehri District of Uttarakhnad State India-A Geospatial Approach for Forest Fire Management

Neelam Rawat; Kishor Kandpal; Saurabh Purohit; Arvind Pandey; Govind Singh Negi; Durgesh Pant

doi:10.36808/if/2017/v143i8/118982

Forest Fire Burnt Assessment Using Different Indices for Tehri District of Uttarakhnad State India-A Geospatial Approach for Forest Fire Management

Authors

Neelam Rawat Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, Dehradun (Uttarakhand)
Kishor Kandpal Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, Dehradun (Uttarakhand)
Saurabh Purohit Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, Dehradun (Uttarakhand)
Arvind Pandey Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, Dehradun (Uttarakhand)
Govind Singh Negi Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, Dehradun (Uttarakhand)
Durgesh Pant Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, Dehradun (Uttarakhand)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36808/if/2017/v143i8/118982

Keywords:

NDVI, NBR, L ANDSAT, VIIRS, Remote Sensing, GIS, MODIS.

Abstract

Forest fire is recognized as one of the major natural disaster damaging huge forest and grassland areas worldwide. Several million hectares of forest land are burnt worldwide annually having diverse impact on country's economics, environment, safety, human health and wildlife. It has also become a common feature in the Indian forest every year, causing incalculable damage to the forest wealth and ecosystem. Forest and wild land fires have been taking place historically, shaping landscape structure, pattern and ultimately the species composition of ecosystems. However uncontrolled and misuse of fire can cause tremendous adverse impacts on the environment and the human society by influencing the species composition and ecosystem processes. Uttarakhand State has been severely affected by forest fires from past few years resulting in prodigious loss to the biodiversity. Due to its synoptic coverage remote sensing has been actively used to detect forest fire locations in near real time. Its synergy with field data and Geographical Information System (GIS) could be critical in decision and policy making for controlling forest fire. The main aim of the present study was to find out the general trend of forest fire in the part of Central Himalaya in the years of 2001, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 using Multi temporal Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM,) Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), and Operational land Imager (OLI) data. Forest Fire locations were taken from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Terra and Aqua datasets along with Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) product. Different spectral indices like Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were found useful for detecting changes over vegetation using multi temporal image data. The total burnt area was assessed in the month of May as 271.47 Km² in 2001, 459.34 Km² in 2004, 119.42 Km² in 2008, 380.83 Km² in 2012, and 331.50 Km² in 2016.

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