Assessment and monitoring of fires caused by the War in Ukraine on Landscape scale

Abstract

The article assesses the changes in the state of Ukraine’s natural environment, namely due to the fire on its territories as a result of military operations. Remote sensing can be considered as a decision support tool for landscape management, remote sensing plays a vital operational tool in the affected areas to assess the consequences, as well as to make appropriate decisions to protect the environment and support environmental recovery programs in these areas. This paper presented applying of remote sensing methods to assess large fires caused by military events in Ukraine war using the VIIRS spectroradiometer (375 m) on board the NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite and NOAA-20 satellites, as well as NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) resource. The paper presents examples of the use of remote sensing to detect changes in territories affected by military operations, and provided estimates of the total number of fires in 2022. Authors proposed a methodology for obtaining daily data on the localization of fires in the territories of active hostilities, in particular in 15 regions of Ukraine that are closest to the front line. Results of this paper indicated the VIIRS spectroradiometer and the FIRM’s resource as an effective tool for monitoring fires and assessing changes in the environment caused by them as a result of military operations in Ukraine. The possibility of using satellite imagery for operational fire monitoring has been proven, which, in combination with traditional ground-based data, can play a crucial role in protecting civilians and providing evidence of environmental violations.