Characterizing Vegetation Fire dynamics in Myanmar and South Asian Countries
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Characterizing Vegetation Fire dynamics in Myanmar and South Asian Countries C. Sudhakar Reddy1 • Anjaly Unnikrishnan1,2 • Natalia Grace Bird1,3 • V. S. Faseela1,2 • Mahbooba Asra1 T. Maya Manikandan1 • P. V. N. Rao1
•
Received: 26 July 2020 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 Indian Society of Remote Sensing 2020
Abstract Fire is among the major disasters leading to biodiversity loss and climate change. Analysing high temporal resolution data over space and time can provide critical inputs for environmental management. The present study attempted to analyse fire occurrences to determine the distribution of vegetation fire hotspots in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. The spatial statistics and space–time pattern mining tools are used for investigating fire trends that occurred across vegetated landscapes over a period of 16 years. This study found a total of 2,352,063 active vegetation fire locations using daily MODIS data from 2003 to 2018. Mann–Kendall test has identified the statistically significant trend of fire hotspots across forests, scrub, grasslands, agriculture, and plantations. The emerging hotspot analysis detected considerable spatial variation across fire hotspots and identified the geographical clusters of fire hotspots across the South Asian countries and Myanmar. The fires showed variations with an increasing or decreasing trend or no statistically significant trend in different land cover types across the eight countries. The emerging hotspot analysis found the dominance of sporadic hotspots and persistent hotspots. Keywords Remote sensing Spatial MODIS Forest Agriculture Crop residue
Introduction Fires are considered to be a potential hazard having physical, biological, ecological, and environmental consequences and one of the major drivers of the global change in terrestrial ecosystems (Rudel et al. 2005). Habitat degradation in natural vegetation is mainly caused by the fires, overgrazing, demand for fuel, charcoal, shifting cultivation, and invasion of alien plant species. Recurrent annual fires may decrease the growth of the native grasses,
& C. Sudhakar Reddy [email protected] 1
National Remote Sensing Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation, Balanagar, Hyderabad, Telangana 500 037, India
2
Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala 695 581, India
3
Centre for Spatial Information Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, Telangana 500 085, India
herbs, and shrubs and destroy the organic matter, which results in increased soil erosion. Vegetation fires are mostly anthropogenic mainly employed for land clearance, grassland management, burning of crop residues, and ease of collection of minor forest produce (Satendra and Kaushik 2014). A considerable amount of active trace gases and aerosols is released into the atmosphere from biomass burning (Andreae and Merlet 2001). But fire frequently plays a critical ecological role as well, particu
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