TITLE:
The Use of VHSR Imagery for Wildland Fire Prevention: Application to Land-Clearing Management in the South of France
AUTHORS:
Sophie Sauvagnargues, Pierre-Alain Ayral, Boris Kabar, David Salze, Vincent Thierion, Denis Marechal
KEYWORDS:
Remote Sensing; Land-Clearing Management; Very High Spatial Resolution; Prevention Policy to Protect Forests from Fire
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.5 No.2,
April
25,
2013
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.