The Use of VHSR Imagery for Wildland Fire Prevention: Application to Land-Clearing Management in the South of France

Sophie Sauvagnargues, Pierre-Alain Ayral, Boris Kabar, David Salze, Vincent Thierion, Denis Marechal

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Ecole des Mines d’Alès-LGEI, Alès, France.

DOI: 10.4236/jgis.2013.52016                

Abstract

Every year, the French Mediterranean area is subject to wildland fires. The prevention policy promotes the major role of forest layout, for which it is necessary to build appropriate facilities such as reducing ignition and fire propagation risks near the borders of roads and tracks, creating forest tracks to allow firefighters to move safely through the forest during a fire, creating fuel breaks in order to divide up forests and limit the propagation of fire. Land-clearing along a forest track consists in creating discontinuity between the herbaceous stratum and the tree stratum by eliminating the shrubby stratum and cutting tree crowns. It avoids fire propagation by convection, and enables firefighters to deal with the fire in safety. The main difficulty for forest officers is to identify an optimized method to select appropriate tracks to clear, because it is impossible to clear all the tracks each year. Remote sensing tools would seem to be particularly useful for obtaining the best strategic and economic overview of forest tracks at departmental scale. This theme “land-clearing evaluation method” was selected as a target application for the images derived from the new Pleiades sensors: products and services required by end users. The objective of this work is to assess the real potentiality of such Very High Spatial Resolution (VHSR) imagery for land-clearing management. The methodology used consists in image classification and spatial analysis in order to extract land-clearing quality, and also evaluation of land-clearing quality based on field questionnaires validated through interactions with firefighters and rangers. The development of this methodology and its application to QuickBird images-used as Pleiades data simulations-successfully showed that VHSR Imagery is useful for preventing fire risk. It seems to be a good perspective for providing operational mapping services to help land-clearing management.

Keywords

Remote Sensing; Land-Clearing Management; Very High Spatial Resolution; Prevention Policy to Protect Forests from Fire

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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