Wetland Fire Assessment and Monitoring in the Paraná River Delta, Using Radar and Optical Data for Burnt Area Mapping

Abstract

In the past decades, important research has been carried out to map the natural disturbances in the Paraná River Delta. The benefits of the combined use optical and radar data are also known. The main objective of this paper is to assess the wetland fire cartography through a synergetic use of radar and optical data. We focus on integrating radar (SAOCOM) and Sentinel 1, as well as Sentinel 2 optical data, concerning the fires impact analyses in the wetland areas. The generation of water masks through the radar images can contribute to improve the burned wetland area estimations. The relationship between landforms, vegetation cover, and the spatial/temporal resolution imposed by the flood pulse, play a vital role in the results. Burnt areas represent a total of 2439.57 sq km, which is more than 85% of the wetland, during the winter and spring (Q3 and Q4) periods. Understanding the wetland heterogeneity and its recovery pattern after a fire, is crucial to improve the cartography of the burned areas; for this, biweekly or monthly image compositions periodicity are of crucial importance. The inclusion of different indexes, for optical and radar images, improve the precision for the final classification. The results obtained here are promising for post-flood and post-fire evaluation, even applying radar and optical data integration into the evaluation and the monitoring of wetland fires is far from being a uniform standardized process.