Landsat imagery evidences great recent land cover changes induced by wild fires in central Siberia

Abstract

The article discusses the methods of satellite image classification to determine general types of forest ecosystems, as well as the long-term monitoring of ecosystems changes using satellite imagery of medium spatial resolution and the daily data of space monitoring of active fires. The area of interest of this work is 100 km footprint of the Zotino Tall Tower Observatory (ZOTTO), located near the Zotino settlement, Krasnoyarsk region. The study area is located in the middle taiga subzone of Western Siberia, are presented by the left and right banks of the Yenisei river. For Landsat satellite imagery supervised classification by the maximum likelihood method was made using ground-based studies over the last fifteen years. The results are the identification of the 10 aggregated classes of land surface and composition of the study area thematic map. Operational satellite monitoring and analysis of spatial information about ecosystem in the 100-kilometer footprint of the ZOTTO tall tower allows to monitor the dynamics of forest disturbance by fire and logging over a long time period and to estimate changes in forest ecosystems of the study area. Data on the number and area of fires detected in the study region for the 2000-2014 received in the work. Calculations show that active fires have burned more than a quarter of the footprint area over the study period. Fires have a significant impact on the redistribution of classes of land surface. Area of all types of vegetation ecosystems declined dramatically under the influence of fires, whereas industrial logging does not impact seriously on it. The results obtained in our work indicate the highest occurrence of fires for lichen forest types within study region, probably due to their high natural fire danger, which is consistent with other studies. The least damage the fire caused to the wetland ecosystem due to high content of moisture and the presence of a large number of fire breaks in the form of open water.