| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.1 MB | Adobe PDF |
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Forest fires are considered by Portuguese civil protection as one of the most serious natural
disasters due to their frequency and extent. To address the problem, the Fire Forest Defense System
establishes the implementation of fuel management bands to aid firefighting. The aim of this study
was to develop a model capable of identifying vegetation removal in the urban–rural interface
defined by law for fuel management actions. The model uses normalised difference vegetation
index (NDVI) of Sentinel-2 images time series and is based on the Welch t-test to find statistically
significant differences between (i) the value of the NDVI in the pixel; (ii) the mean of the NDVI in
the pixels of the same land cover type in a radius of 500 m; and (iii) their difference. The model
identifies a change when the t-test points for a significant difference of the NDVI value in the ‘pixel’
as comparted to the ‘difference’ but not the ‘mean’. We use a moving window limited to 60 days
before and after the analysed date to reduce the phenological variations of vegetation. The model
was applied in five municipalities of Portugal and the results are promising to identify the places
where the management of fuel bands was not carried out. This indicates which model could be used
to assist in the verification of the annual management of the fuel bands defined in the law.
Description
Keywords
Sentinel 2 Forest fires NDVI Vegetation change Fuel management
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Barbosa, B., Rocha, J., Costa, H., & Caetano, M. (2022). Uncovering vegetation changes in the urban–rural interface through semi-automatic methods. Applied Sciences, 12(5), 2294. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app12052294
Publisher
MDPI