Technique for Identifying Burned Vegetation Area using Landsat 8 Data

During the last two decades, forest and land fire is a catastrophic event that happens almost every year in Indonesia. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a technic to monitor forest fires using satellite data to obtain the latest information of burned area in a large scale area. The objective of this research is to develop a method for burned area mapping that happened between two Landsat 8 data recording on August 13rd and September 14th 2015. Burned area was defined as a burned area of vegetation. The hotspot distribution during the period August - September 2015 was used to help visual identification of burned area on the Landsat image and to verify the burned area resulted from this research. Samples were taken at several land covers to determine the spectral pattern differences among burned area, bare area and other land covers, and then the analysis was performed to determine the suitable spectral bands or indices and threshold values that will be used in the model. Landsat recorded on August 13rd before the fire was extracted for soil, while Landsat recorded on September 14th after the fire was extracted for burned area. Multi-temporal analysis was done to get the burned area occurring during the certain period. The results showed that the clouds could be separated using combination of ocean blue and cirrus bands, the burned area was extracted using a combination of NIR and SWIR band, while soil was extracted using ratio SWIR / NIR. Burned area obtained in this study had high correlation with the hotspot density of MODIS with the accuracy was around 82,4 %.