Temporal Analysis of Forest Fires With Remote Sensing Technologies: Mediterranean and Aegean Fires in 2021

The aim of this study is to analyze the forest fires, occurred in Manavgat, Bodrum and Marmaris districts in July and August 2021, using remote sensing techniques with multi-temporal optical satellite images and to determine the boundaries of the damaged areas. ESA’s Sentinel-2 images acquired before, during and after fires were obtained for the analyses. Estimated results revealed that Manavgat fire damaged 47,824 ha areas and 59% of the burned area occurred within the first two days. The forest fires taken place in Muğla province were effective in an area of over 10,000 ha. Burn severity difference maps were also produced to evaluate both the visual and metric comparison of the burn severity levels of each study area during and after the forest fires. According to the obtained results, the areas labelled as high burn severity were much higher in both temporal periods for the study areas. Furthermore, the performance comparison of 5 spectral indexes (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Mid-infrared Burn Index (MIRBI), Burn Area Index (BAI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and Chlorophyll Sensitive Index (CSI) in detecting of the boundaries of the damaged areas was performed based on M-statistics, and results showed that NDVI and NBR were the two most effective indices in separating the burnt areas from the unburned areas.