Just earlier this week (May), news portals and social media were abuzz with reports of another tragedy in 2020 - that of Forest Fires ravaging Uttarakhand - a northern state of India flanked by the Himalayas with nearly half its land cover forested. As the story garnered hysteria, the state's Forest department was compelled to issue clarifications - a) the Fires were not as devastating or widespread as claimed, and b) Fire crews had them under control, assisted by rains across the state. Such was the fallout from the fake reporting that those engaging in it were 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 causes were cited as the driving factors behind the disaster in this already-fragile ecosystem. Forest Fires is not a surprising phenomenon per se - warm temperatures, low moisture, and strong winds at high altitudes are some of the natural causes behind this calamity.
Using Remote Sensing, I am aware that one can perform a couple of Fire detection workflows - Active Fire Detection and Burned Area Mapping. I have utilized the latter in my study. As my Area of Interest (AoI), I've selected a cross-section within the state - Kumaon division and adjacent regions which are apparently reeling from forest fires - where I will use two sets of Sentinel-2 Multispectral Satellite Imagery, the Crisis image acquired on May 26 and the Archive image acquired on April 6 this year to identify the Burned areas and to classify it based on the Burn severity.
Burned Area Mapping is possible through Multispectral Remote Sensing, a passive Imagery acquisition technique which utilizes Solar Radiation as its mode of illumination and whose reflectance from surface features on earth is captured across multiple spectral bands of wavelength by the receiver instrument onboard the satellite. This is because Healthy and Unhealthy/Burned/Damaged/Dead vegetation respond in a starkly contrasting manner to Solar Radiation - refer Figure 1 which indicates that the Near Infrared energy (present within solar radiation) reflected by Burned Vegetation is at most 20% compared to Healthy Vegetation which reflects nearly 40% of it.
The Reflectance behaviour i.e. Spectral Response, is virtually reversed when these two types of vegetation are exposed to the Shortwave Infrared wavelengths of solar radiation which Burned Vegetation reflects a significant quantity of (a shade over 40%) whereas Healthy Vegetation reflects only little of it (at most 20%). Thus, by analyzing the NIR and SWIR reflectance values over the Area of Interest, one would be able to detect the pixels which have switched to being Burned in the Crisis image from being Healthy in the Archive image.
My Burned Area Mapping output derived using this method is depicted below-
To interpret the output, observe the classification index developed by The U.S. Geological Survey on the right - the bottom three classes have the maximum Burn severity - Moderate-low, Moderate-high and High i.e. the orange, red and purple pixels respectively.
There are two regions in particular where one can observe a cluster of these pixels-
1) west and central portions of Udham Singh Nagar district towards the south of the map, and
2) a portion of Almora district just above its label towards the north of the map.
This being said, Low severity Burned areas (yellow pixels) are visible across the Area of Interest, predominantly towards the south of the map.
An aspect which caught my attention was that while the terrain of Almora is hilly and forested i.e. ripe candidate for Forest Fires, Udham Singh Nagar is predominantly flat and agrarian in terms of its land cover. This made me wonder why the latter has so many Burned areas, which can obviously not be attributed to Forest Fires. Therefore I decided to probe the findings-
Slider 1: Burned Areas in Udham Singh Nagar district overlaid on Google Earth Basemap
'The Burned areas are directly over Farmlands!', I exclaimed.
Curious to know more about this discovery, I reached out to my friend, Akhil Gupta, who is natively from Uttarakhand as well as is in agri-business. And lo! upon checking he provided some valuable to in-situ information - travelers on this route did witness the farmlands on fire. Apparently, there was a delay in the Spring Harvest (Baisakhi) this year which would have compelled the farmers to burn the fields in order to get it ready in quick time for sowing the Monsoon crop (Kharif). I can't help but be reminded of the notorious stubble burning practices by farmers in Punjab, India which causes devastating Air Pollution in and around the capital Delhi every year. Besides ignorant practices such as these, Akhil indicated that deforestation by the Timber mafia is also a major contributing factor behind some of the major Forest Fires in this region.
Personally, I enjoyed working on this Remote Sensing study and the in-situ observations helped me validate a portion of my output. One hopes that Uttarakhand cracks down on Timber smugglers before they wreak more havoc. Educating the farmers about sustainable Agriculture practises would help (February 2025 Update - I do sell patented solutions which can help accelerate the shift to Natural Farming with more and better quality Yields at lower cost. Reach out to know more).
I'm aware that Uttarakhand's Forest department uses Satellite Imagery to detect and monitor Forest Fires. Nonetheless, the findings from this independent study of mine can be considered as further evidence that claims of rampant wildfires in this region are largely unsubstantiated, and/or have already been brought under control by the Forest department with valuable assistance from Mother Nature in the form of Rainfall.
Fair to say, this is a much-needed respite from the horrors that 2020 is replete with!
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