• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.36 no.6_2
• /
• pp.1551-1565
• /
• 2020

On April 4, 2019, a forest fire started in Goseong County and lasted for three days, burning the neighboring areas of Sokcho. The strong winds moved the blaze from one region to another region and declared the worst wildfire in South Korea in years. More than 1,880 facilities, including 400 homes, were burnt down. The fire burned a total area of 529 hectares (1,307 acres), which involved 13,000 rescuers and 16,500 military troops to control the fire occurrence. Thousands of people were evacuated, and two people are dead. This study generated post-wildfire maps to provide necessary data for evacuation and mitigation planning to respond to this destructive wildfire, also prevent further damage and restore the area affected by the wildfire. This study used KOMPSAT-3A and Sentinel-2 imagery to map the post-wildfire condition. The SVM showed higher accuracy (overall accuracy 95.29%) compared with ANN (overall accuracy of 94.61%) for the KOMPSAT-3A. Moreover, for Sentinel-2, the SVM attained a higher accuracy (overall accuracy of 91.52%) than the ANN algorithm (overall accuracy 90.11%). In total, four post-wildfire burned area maps were generated; these results can be used to assess the area affected by the Sokcho wildfire and wildfire mitigation planning in the future.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
• /
• v.2 no.3
• /
• pp.117-129
• /
• 2013

The increasing demand for monitoring wildfires and their impact on the land surface have prompted studies of burned area extraction and analysis. To differentiate burned and unburned area, the earlier method of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) Burned Area Detection Algorithm was proposed to estimate the change in land surface based on the reflectance energy. The energy, whose wavelengths are sensitive to burning, was selected to calculate the change parameter $Z_{score}$. This method was applied using the MODIS images to produce a MODIS Burned Area product. The approach was to simplify this algorithm to make it compatible with the Landsat 7 ETM+ SLC-off images. To extract the refined version of burned regions, post-processing was carried out by applying a median filter, dilation morphology algorithm, and finally a gap filling method. The experimental results showed that the detailed burned areas extracted from the proposed method exhibited more spatial details than those of the MODIS Burned products in the large U.S areas. The results also revealed the discontinuous distribution of burned regions in Vietnam forests.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.36 no.1
• /
• pp.29-39
• /
• 2020

Forest fire is a critical disaster that causes massive destruction of forest ecosystem and economic loss. Hence, accurate estimation of the burned area is important for evaluation of the degree of damage and for preparing baseline data for recovery. Since most of the area size damaged by wildfires in Korea is less than 1 ha, it is necessary to use satellite or drone images with a resolution of less than 10m for detecting the damage area. This paper aims to detect wildfire-damaged area from a Kompsat-3 image using the indices such as NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) and FBI (fire burn index) and to examine the classification characteristics according to the methods such as Otsu thresholding and ISODATA(iterative self-organizing data analysis technique). To mitigate the salt-and-pepper phenomenon of the pixel-based classification, a gaussian filter was applied to the images of NDVI and FBI. Otsu thresholding and ISODATA could distinguish the burned forest from normal forest appropriately, and the salt-and-pepper phenomenon at the boundaries of burned forest was reduced by the gaussian filter. The result from ISODATA with gaussian filter using NDVI was closest to the official record of damage area (56.9 ha) published by the Korea Forest Service. Unlike Otsu thresholding for binary classification,since the ISODATA categorizes the images into multiple classes such as(1)severely burned area, (2) moderately burned area, (3) mixture of burned and unburned areas, and (4) unburned area, the characteristics of the boundaries consisting of burned and normal forests can be better expressed. It is expected that our approach can be utilized for the high-resolution images obtained from other satellites and drones.

• Journal of Microbiology
• /
• v.42 no.4
• /
• pp.278-284
• /
• 2004

Changes in the soil bacterial community of a coniferous forest were analyzed to assess microbial responses to wildfire. Soil samples were collected from three different depths in lightly and severely burned areas, as well as a nearby unburned control area. Direct bacterial counts ranged from $3.3­22.6\times10^8\;cells/(g{\cdot}soil).$ In surface soil, direct bacterial counts of unburned soil exhibited a great degree of fluctuation. Those in lightly burned soil changed less, but no significant variation was observed in the severely burned soil. The fluctuations of direct bacterial count were less in the middle and deep soil lay­ers. The structure of the bacterial community was analyzed via the fluorescent in situ hybridization method. The number of bacteria detected with the eubacteria-targeted probe out of the direct bacterial count varied from $30.3\;to\;84.7\%,$ and these ratios were generally higher in the burned soils than in the unburned control soils. In the surface unburned soil, the ratios of $\alpha,\;\beta\;and\;gamma-proteobacteria,$ Cytoph­aga-Flavobacterium group, and other eubacteria groups to total eubacteria were 9.9, 10.6, 15.5, 9.0, and $55.0\%,$ respectively, and these ratios were relatively stable. The ratios of $\alpha,\;\beta\;and\;gamma-proteobacteria,$ and Cytophaga-Flavobacterium group to total eubacteria increased immediately after the wildfire, and the other eubacterial proportions decreased in the surface and middle layer soils. By way of contrast, the composition of the 5 groups of eubacteria in the subsurface soil exhibited no significant fluctuations dur­ing the entire period. The total bacterial population and bacterial community structure disturbed by wildfire soon began to recover, and original levels seemed to be restored 3 months after the wildfire.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
• /
• v.17 no.2 s.52
• /
• pp.225-233
• /
• 2007

The engineering properties of surface soils in natural terrain are changed due to wildfire. This change of engineering properties induced by wildfire is related to landslides occurrence. To investigate the change of soil properties caused by wildfire, the various soil tests are performed. The soil samples are obtained from the recently burned slopes of Yangyang area, Kangwon Province. The soil samples obtained from the burned slopes are classified into three types depending on the burning grade: the perfect burning grade, the intermediate burning grade, the non-burning grade. As the result of tests, the specific gravity and the dry unit weight of soils obtained from perfect and alternative burning grades are less than those of soils obtained from non-burning grade. It judges that an electronic force, ionic components and of soils are changed and organic matters in soils are burned by wildfire. The permeability of soil obtained from alternative burning grade is the lowest and that of soil obtained from perfect burning grade is the highest. The water-repellent layer is formed on soil surface by wildfire. The water-repellent layer is existed at the area of alternative turning grade, while the layer is not existed at the area of perfect burning grade. The water-repellent layer is collapsed in high temperature more than about $400^{\circ}C$.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
• /
• 2020.06a
• /
• pp.4-4
• /
• 2020

Three wildfires severely damaged local towns and forests in Gangwon-do, South Korea in 2019 April 4-5. Local hydrological regime could be greatly altered by the wildfires, therefore it is important to assess its damage (e.g. area and severity) and also resultant changes in hydrological fluxes. We retrieved the Normalized-Burned Ratio (NBR) index using remote-sensing data (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 500-m 8-day surface reflectance data), and delineated the damaged-area based on the difference in the NBR (dNBR) before and after the wildfires. We then estimated changes in the annual evapotranspiration (AET) in 2019 using the MODIS evapotranspiration data (500-m 8-day). It was found that the damaged-area of the three wildfires was 29.50 km^2 in total, which take up 1.00-6.19% area of five catchments. It was estimated that the AET would be decreased as 0.05-1.56% over those five catchments, as compared to the pre-fire AET (2004-2018). The impact of the wildfires on the catchment AET was less severe than expected (i.e. up to 1.56%) mostly because two big wildfires were distributed across two catchments respectively (i.e. four catchments for the two wildfires) and the other wildfire was small and not severe. This study highlights the importance of assessing the area and severity of a wildfire when estimating its impact on the local hydrological cycle.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.27 no.3
• /
• pp.176-181
• /
• 2012

In this research the 2009 spring occurred during forest fire ImSil and research destination GyeongJu has been selected. Research in the field of the target time exploratory Boundary Data through after air photos, satellite photos and topographic map by using the combustion area was calculated. 2009 March 1-forest fire occurs on the day of the weather information and weather changes wildfire in the check in any affected. Study research destination of combustion is ImSil 161 ha, GyeongJu 270.93 ha. The impact of the weather-temperature dry weather forest fires this favorable situation to occur and the wind directions and the spread of the mountain wind speed was less impact has no arguments.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
• /
• v.52 no.11
• /
• pp.941-946
• /
• 2019

A wildfire could significantly alter the local hydrological regime, depending on the area and severity, and thus it is critical to understand its effect and feedback using data and simulation. For the wildfire in Gangwon-do on April 4-5, 2019, South Korea, we retrieved the Normalized-Burned Ratio (NBR) index using remote-sensing data (500-m 8-day MODIS surface reflectance data), and detect the damaged-area based on the difference in the NBR (dNBR) before and after the fire. The damaged area was $29.50km^2$ in total, taking up 1.00-6.19% of five catchments. We then used remote-sensing data (500-m 8-day MODIS evapotranspiration data) and estimated that annual evapotranspiration (AET) would decrease as 0.05-1.56% over the five catchments, as compared to the pre-fire AET (2004-2018). This study highlights the importance of improving our understanding about the impact of wildfire on the local hydrological cycle.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.38 no.6_3
• /
• pp.1861-1869
• /
• 2022

Recent climate change can increase the frequency and damage of wildfires worldwide. It can also lead to the deterioration of the forest ecosystem and increase casualties and economic loss. Satellite-based indices for forest damage can facilitate an objective and rapid examination of burned areas and help analyze inaccessible places like North Korea. In this letter, we conducted a detection of burned areas in North Korea using the traditional Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to represent vegetation vitality, and the Fire Burn Index (FBI) and Forest Withering Index (FWI) that were recently developed. Also, we suggested a strategy for the satellite-based detection of burned areas in the Korean Peninsula as a result of comparing the four indices. Future work requires the examination of small-size wildfires and the applicability of deep learning technologies.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.36 no.2_1
• /
• pp.179-197
• /
• 2020

Topographic normalization reduces the terrain effects on reflectance by adjusting the brightness values of the image pixels to be equal if the pixels cover the same land-cover. Topographic effects are induced by the imaging conditions and tend to be large in high mountainousregions. Therefore, image analysis on mountainous terrain such as estimation of wildfire damage assessment requires appropriate topographic normalization techniques to yield accurate image processing results. However, most of the previous studies focused on the evaluation of topographic normalization on satellite images with moderate-low spatial resolution. Thus, the alleviation of topographic effects on multi-temporal high-resolution images was not dealt enough. In this study, the evaluation of terrain normalization was performed for each band to select the optimal technical combinations for rapid and accurate wildfire damage assessment using PlanetScope images. PlanetScope has considerable potential in the disaster management field as it satisfies the rapid image acquisition by providing the 3 m resolution daily image with global coverage. For comparison of topographic normalization techniques, seven widely used methods were employed on both pre-fire and post-fire images. The analysis on bi-temporal images suggests the optimal combination of techniques which can be applied on images with different land-cover composition. Then, the vegetation index was calculated from the images after the topographic normalization with the proposed method. The wildfire damage detection results were obtained by thresholding the index and showed improvementsin detection accuracy for both object-based and pixel-based image analysis. In addition, the burn severity map was constructed to verify the effects oftopographic correction on a continuous distribution of brightness values.