Using SAR-data and optical data to delineate burned territories in Kalmykia, Chernye Zemli reserve

Abstract

Abstract The study of fires and their consequences using remote sensing methods in the optical range is widespread. There are many studies devoted to forest fires, a little less to fires in arid areas. At the same time, even in arid regions, weather conditions do not always allow us to get a correct representation of the fire spread in a sufficiently high spatial resolution (the first tens of meters). Our study is related to the territory of Chernye Zemli reserve located in Kalmykia, Russian Federation. In this study, we are conducting an experiment on the joint use of multitemporal synthesis of vertical polarization radar data and the burn index (dNBR2) according to Landsat-8 satellite data. The use of the image segmentation approach gave good results in identifying the boundaries of the burned territories from radar data, and the use of a training sample from optical data index image made it possible to classify the selected superpixels according to the classes of “burned” or “not burned”.