The impact of forest fire on forest cover types in Mongolia

Abstract

The objective of this study was the impact of forest fire on forest cover types. This study has identified non-forest and forest area that has seven forest class are included with cedar, pine, larch, birch, birch-pine mixed, birch-larch mixed and cedar-larch mixed, additionally, remote sensing imagery is applied. In contrast, Landsat imagery has been used several classification approaches. Moreover, the current classification has developments in segmentation and object-oriented techniques offer the suitable analysis to classify satellite data. In the object-oriented classification approach, images cluster to homogenous area as forest types by suitable parameters in some level. The accuracy analysis revealed that overall accuracy showed a good accuracy of determination (86.33 percent in 2000 and 93.75 percent in 2011) with regard to identify of the forest cover and type. Furthermore, these results suggest that the Landsat TM and ETM+ data can reliable detect the forest type based upon the segmentation and object-oriented techniques. In generally, our study area is high-risky region to forest fires. It is higher influence to forest cover and tree species and other ecosystems. Overall, wildfire of impact results showed that 25239 ha of forests were changed to burnt area and 52603 ha forests were changed to grassland.