FCCC: Forest Cover Change Calculator User Interface for Identifying Fire Incidents in Forest Region using Satellite Data

Abstract

For the ecosystem to maintain a balance between the social and environmental spheres, forests play a crucial role. The greatest threat to forests for this significance, is fires and natural disasters caused by several factors. It is crucial to assess the genesis and behavioral characteristics of fires in forest areas. The discovery of the forest fire areas and the intensity of the fire affected are greatly facilitated by the satellite image obtained by different sensors and data sets. We are suggesting a novel approach to compute changes using spectral indices, using landsat-9 and sentinel-2 satellite datasets for measuring the change in forest areas affected by fire accidents over Kochi areas on March 2023. Kochi is a city in Kerala, South India, and is located at 9° 50’ 20.7348” N and 77° 10’ 13.8828” E. coordinates. Computation is performed by calculating forest area before the fire incident (pre-fire) and after the fire incident (post-fire) and total loss is calculated by the difference between pre-fire and postfire incident. The proposed work uses Sentinel-2 and Landsat-9 satellite images to recover burn scars using several vegetation indicators. We have identified the fire locations using the objectbased classification approach. For verification of results computed by vegetation indices, we have also performed land use land cover classification and calculated the changes in forest areas. Accuracy is computed by the confusion matrix with an accuracy of 89.45% and the kappa coefficient with an accuracy of 87.68%. In particular, there was a strong correlation between forest loss and the burned area in the subtropical evergreen broadleaf forest zone (6.9%) and the deciduous coniferous forest zone (18.9% of the lands). These findings serve as a foundation for future forecasts of fire-induced forest loss in regions with similar climatic and environmental conditions.