Monitoring and Estimating the Fire-Affected Areas of the Zagros Mountains Using Landsat Satellite Images

Forests have an extremely important place in the ecosystem in terms of providing social and environmental balances. Fire is the greatest danger to forests. Therefore, estimating fire formation and its behavioral characteristics is very important to deal with this issue. Every year, large areas of forests in the Zagros region in western Iran are burned and destroyed. The extent and distribution of fires, the mountainous terrain, and the difficulty of crossing the predominantly forested areas of the Zagros Mountain Range have hampered managers’ abilities to obtain quantitatively reliable information about the burned areas, levels of damage, as well as their statistics and factual information. Utilizing appropriate and available satellite data and images can provide useful information about pre- and post-forest fire conditions. The aim of this study was to estimate fire affected areas and be aware of the efficiency and capability of Landsat satellite data and NBR and dNBR indices in identifying, evaluating, and mapping the burned forests of Zagros region. For this purpose, after preparing the required images, the fires that occurred in June 2016 in the forests of Zagros were investigated by using remote sensing techniques and the necessary processing. The results showed that NBR and dNBR indices provided good information about the impact of fire and its changes. 13685 hectares of Zagros forests were burned in this fire in 2016.