Just earlier this week, News portals and Social media were abuzz with reports of another tragedy in 2020 - Forest Fires across Uttarakhand - a northern, agricultural-dominant state of India crossed by the Himalayas at its north. As the story gained momentum, the state's Forest department came up with clarifications - the fires were not as devastating as claimed and more importantly, were under control. Also, the rains this week had doused the fires and prevented it from spreading further and causing more damage. However, such was the fallout of the initial exaggerated reporting that those deemed to have spread it were even charged with a criminal offence.
Some of you may remember that Uttarakhand was severely impacted by Forest Fires in 2016. Accidental as well as intentional reasons were cited as reasons behind the disaster. Forest Fires as a phenomenon are not very uncommon though - warm temperatures, low moisture and strong winds at high altitudes are some of the natural causes behind this calamity.
With Satellite Imagery, I am aware that it is possible to do two kinds of Fire Detection and Monitoring workflows- 1) Active Fire Detection and 2) Burned Area Mapping. For this article, I have used the latter. The Area of Interest is a subset within Uttarakhand - Kumaon and adjacent regions - supposedly most affected by the fires, as recorded by the Forest Department. To do the analysis, I have used Sentinel-2 Optical Satellite Imagery captured before and after the days of crisis, April 6th and May 26th of 2020 respectively, to classify the Burn severity. The result of my study has been overlaid on an Imagery Basemap below:
Prepared using ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2B Satellite Imagery. Much thanks to RUS Copernicus and GitHub for the training material.
To interpret the Map depiction, you will have to observe the classification table in the legend section, as proposed by The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). For spotting the Burnt areas, the bottom three classes are most relevant i.e. from Moderate-low severity to High severity. In the map, there are two regions in particular which fall under these categories - 1) West and Central parts of Udham Singh Nagar district towards the south of the depiction and 2) a small area above the Almora district label towards the north of the depiction. The remaining regions do not appear to have significant Burn damage, although Low severity Burnt areas (shaded in yellow) are visible across the map extent, predominantly towards the south.
One interesting aspect to note is that while the terrain of Almora is forested and hilly (and quite possibly, the red colored area within is exactly where the Fires had been reported from), Udham Singh Nagar is plain-like in terms of its terrain which should make one wonder as to why this region is appearing to have so many Burnt spots.
Upon closer inspection of the Burnt areas in Udham Singh Nagar - by overlaying the Remotely-Sensed and extracted output on Google Earth's Basemap Imagery, I was able to observe this...
Slider of Burned Area Output within remotely sensed data of Udham Singh Nagar district of Uttarakhand overlaid on Google Earth's Imagery Basemap
The Burnt areas in Udham Singh Nagar are directly above Farmlands!
My friend, Akhil Gupta, who is a resident and has in-situ knowledge, validated this finding for me - Travelers on this route had witnessed the farmlands on fire / as burnt. Apparently, there was a delay in the Spring Harvest this season (Baisakhi) which may have compelled the farmers to burn the fields to get it ready in quick time for sowing the Monsoon (Kharif) Crop.
I can't help but be reminded of the notorious stubble burning practices by farmers in Punjab which causes so much Air Pollution in Delhi-NCR region every year. As Akhil had indicated, ignorant practices such as these, as well as the deforestation caused by the Timber mafia, often acts as the driving force behind some of the major fires in this region.
The learnings derived from this Remote Sensing-based study and the in-situ observations were an eye-opener for me and perhaps, you found it to be insightful too. I hope that the State's Forest and Agriculture departments are closely monitoring such activities and will contain the Timber smugglers before they wreak further havoc to the beautiful, yet sensitive ecosystem of Uttarakhand and educate the farmers about sustainable agriculture practises respectively. I'm aware that they too use Satellite Imagery to spot and monitor Forest Fires. Nonetheless, the findings from my study can be considered as further proof that the claims of rampant 'Forest Fires' in this region could be largely unsubstantiated, and/or has been brought under control effectively by the Forest department with assistance from Mother Nature (through Rainfall).
Fair to say, this is a much-needed respite from the horrors that 2020 is replete with!
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