This tutorial describes a method for monitoring wildfires using SCP and the freely available images acquired by Landsat and MODIS.
Monitoring wildfires and assessing burn severity are crucial activities for the protection of forests and more in general for the management of environment and ecosystem services. Remote sensing is very useful for the monitoring of large fires, and several projects provide this information such as the Copernicus Burnt Area at the global level, or the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity for the USA.
The educational purpose of this tutorial is to monitor burnt area in a semi-automatic way, exploiting the characteristics of satellite images that can be downloaded with SCP. In particular, we are going to calculate a spectral index named Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) described in this paper A project for monitoring trends in burn severity (Eidenshink, et al., 2007) .
We are going to use MODIS Products that allow for the daily monitoring of fires, at 250m spatial resolution, in addition to Landsat images that have higher spatial resolution.
In this tutorial we are going to study the large fires that occurred in the Madeira Island (Portugal) in August 2016. For more details, please read this informative page by NASA Earth Observatory.
