A trend of increasing burned areas in Iraq from 2001 to 2019

Rasul, Azad; Ibrahim, Gaylan Rasul Faqe; Hameed, Hasan Mohammed; Tansey, Kevin

doi:10.1007/s10668-020-00842-7

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The July war caused major environmental damages, including direct damage to the Lebanese forests, especially in Southern Lebanon where bombing incineration caused the majority of the forest fire outbreaks as previously reported [114][115][116]. It is interesting to note that in areas of conflict, the use of intended fire as a political means to dislocate civilian populations and military forces, resulting in increased forest fires, has recently been documented (Turkish Kurdistan, Syria, Iraq) [117][118][119][120]. During the July war of 2006, the main bombing locations in Lebanon were the South (South and Nabatiyeh governorates) and the Beqaa valley (Baalbek-Hermel and Beqaa governorates); together they accounted for about 52% of the BA observed.…”

Section: Interannual Burnt Area and Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire Regime Analysis in Lebanon (2001–2020): Combining Remote Sensing Data in a Scarcely Documented Area

Majdalani

Koutsias

Faour

et al. 2022

Fire

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Fire is a recurrent disturbance in Mediterranean ecosystems. Data assemblage from forest fire services can provide useful information for understanding climate controls on daily fire hazard or long term trends. Located at the driest range of the Mediterranean bioclimate, and with contrasting socio-political systems compared to the European area, the southern Mediterranean ecosystems are subjected to more extreme climate and social events. This could potentially lead to unique fire regimes and trends worth being characterized for prevention plans and ecosystem management. However, the region is far less documented, due to missing or inhomogeneous fire records, leaving local authorities with no management strategies when large fires happen. We filled this knowledge gap for Lebanon by combining high spatial resolution Landsat data with high temporal resolution VIIRS (S-NPP and NOAA-20) and MODIS (MCD14ML) hotspots to characterize the seasonal and interannual fire regime over the 2001–2020 period. Numerous small fires were hardly detected by global remote sensing. We estimated that 2044 ha burn annually, representing 0.58% of the wildland cover, with no significant trend over the period, but with non climate-related fires detected during the year experiencing socio-political troubles. The spatial and temporal resolution of this dataset identified a particular prolonged fire season up to November, and an unusual bimodal fire season peaking in July and November. We related these features to the prolonged autumnal soil drought and high August air humidity in the region. This updated fire regime in Lebanon illustrates the benefits of this combined approach for data-scarce regions and provides new insights on the variability of fire weather types in the Mediterranean basin.

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Section: Interannual Burnt Area and Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire Regime Analysis in Lebanon (2001–2020): Combining Remote Sensing Data in a Scarcely Documented Area

Majdalani

Koutsias

Faour

et al. 2022

Fire

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“…However, there was an increase in fires in both cropland areas and bare soil/sparse vegetation areas from 2017. One explanation is an increased use of fire in management of agricultural land as a method to improve soils [31]. Fires in bare soil/sparse vegetation areas are less expected, which necessitates field verification.…”

Section: Spatiotemporal Patterns Of Conflict and Fire Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There was also an increase in fires after the failure of the peace process between the Turkish State and the Kurdistan Workers' Party in 2015 [30]. In neighbouring Iraq, Rasul et al [31] reported an increase in burned land area between 2001 and 2019, especially in the northern parts, including the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I). One of the reasons for this sharp increase in burned area was attributed to the intentional burning of cropland as well as the overall geopolitical instability in the country.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, croplands, forests and pastures are consistently under the influence of anthropogenic activity and at the receiving end of social and political decisions [34], inter-group conflict and terrorism [35,36] due to their importance for food security and livelihoods. Second, croplands in Iraq are regularly burned as part of the agricultural cycle, and the trend in their burned area has increased considerably in recent years [31], while 15% of the country's forests, which are mostly located in the KR-I, are at high risk of forest fires [37]. We are also interested in areas with sparse vegetation cover as such regions were found to be linked to anthropogenic activity in a biophysically similar area in Syria [38].…”

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confidence: 99%

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On the Geopolitics of Fire, Conflict and Land in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Eklund

Abdi

Shahpurwala³

et al. 2021

Remote Sensing

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There is limited understanding of the geopolitics of fire, conflict, and land, for example, how conflict and fire are related and how conflict impacts the biophysical environment. Since 2014, the natural environment in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq has been negatively affected by recurrent conflict that coincided with a sharp increase in the number of reported fires. Against this background, this study explores the spatiotemporal aspects of conflict, fire, and land use and land cover in this region. We combine several satellite-derived products, including land use and land cover, active fire, and precipitation. We apply a partial correlation analysis to understand the relationship between fire, conflict, climate, and land use and land cover. Conflict events and fires have increased since 2014 and have followed a similar temporal pattern, and we show that certain conflicts were particular to certain land use and land cover contexts. For example, the conflict involving the Islamic State was concentrated in southern areas with bare soil/sparse vegetation, and the conflict involving Turkey largely took place in northern mountainous areas characterized by natural vegetation and rugged topography. This dichotomy indicates divergent effects of conflict on the land system. A surprising finding was that fire hotspots had a low positive correlation with the amplitude of distance to conflict while accounting for other variables such as land cover and climate. The high statistical significance of this relationship indicates nonlinearity and implies that a larger range of distances to conflict creates more space for the fires to spread in the surrounding landscape. At the same time, fire hotspots had a weaker but negative correlation to distance from conflict events, which is somewhat expected as areas farther away from conflict locations have lower exposure risk to fires. We discuss the implications of these findings within the geopolitical context of the region and acknowledge the limitations of the study. We conclude with a summary of the main findings and recommendations for future research.

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“…In the works [Rasul, et al, 2021;Ertugrul, et al, 2019;Lasko, 2019], the authors determine the dynamics of increasing the large burned areas of forest over certain periods of time using remote sensing data from the resource MCD64A1 500m. The main factors causing the increase of fires in the studied regions are analyzed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geodesy, Cartography and Aerial Photography

Babushka¹,

Babiy²,

Chetverikov³

et al. 2021

ISTCGCAP

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Earth remote sensing and using the satellite images play an important role when monitoring the effects of forest fires and assessing damage. Applying different methods of multispectral space images processing, we can determine the risk of fire distribution, define hot spots and determine thermal parameters, mapping the damaged areas and assess the consequences of fire. The purpose of the work is the severity assessment connected with the post-fire period on the example of the forests in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. The tasks of the study are to define the area of burned zones using space images of different time which were obtained from the Sentinel-2 satellite applying the method of a normalized burn ratio (NBR) and method of supervised classification. Space images taken from the Sentinel-2 satellite before and after the fire were the input data for the study. Copernicus Open Access Hub service is a source of images and its spatial resolution is 10 m for visible and near infrared bands of images, and 20 m for medium infrared bands of images. We used method of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and automatically calculated the area damaged with fire. Using this index we were able to identify areas of zones after active combustion. This index uses near and middle infrared bands for the calculations. In addition, a supervised classification was performed on the study area, and signature files were created for each class. According to the results of the classification, the areas of the territories damaged by the fire were also calculated. The scientific novelty relies upon the application of a method of using the normalized combustion coefficient (NBR) and supervised classification for space images obtained before and after the fire in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The practical significance lies in the fact that the studied methods of GIS technologies can be used to identify territories and calculate the areas of vegetation damaged by fires. These results can be used by local organizations, local governments and the Ministry of Emergency Situations to monitor the condition and to plan reforestation. The normalized burned ratio (NBR) gives possibility efficiently and operatively to define and calculate the area which were damaged by fires, that gives possibility operatively assess the consequences of such fires and estimate the damage. The normalized burned ratio allows to calculate the area of burned forest almost 2 times more accurately than the supervised classification. The calculation process itself also takes less time and does not require additional procedures (set of signatures). Supervised classification in this case gives worse accuracy, the process itself is longer, but allows to determine the area of several different classes.

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A trend of increasing burned areas in Iraq from 2001 to 2019

Cited by 14 publications

References 20 publications

Fire Regime Analysis in Lebanon (2001–2020): Combining Remote Sensing Data in a Scarcely Documented Area

Fire Regime Analysis in Lebanon (2001–2020): Combining Remote Sensing Data in a Scarcely Documented Area

On the Geopolitics of Fire, Conflict and Land in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Geodesy, Cartography and Aerial Photography

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