The estimated total area of forest fire in Siak Regency, Riau Province during the early period of COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

Abstract Forest fires in Indonesia are more prominently caused by human factors rather than natural factors. In 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak resulted in social distancing policies which leads to the restriction and limitation of human activities. This research aims to compare the forest fire areas and the number of cases between the early period of the COVID-19 outbreak and the normal period before the outbreak. In this research, we used Sentinel-2 images for further analysis through visual method and Normalized Burn Ratio method. Additionally, the ground check was also carried out in the burnt area. The estimation based on the visual analysis resulted in a total burnt area of 459.71 ha with 4 counts of cases. While based on the NBR result, it was 302.79 ha. For comparison, during the same period in 2019 in the same focus research area, there are 7 forest fire cases with a total burnt area of 1,236.80 ha. These results indicate that in terms of total burnt area and count of cases, there are fewer burnt areas in 2020 compared to the burnt areas in 2019. In conclusion, restrictions on human activity are suspected to be the cause of the reduced area of the fire.