Multi-time mapping of forest firest in the Lihué Calel Park (La Pampa): integration of data and techniques

Abstract

Understanding the interaction between natural and socio-economic factors that determines the fire regime is essential to be able to make projections and impact evaluations more and more accurate. For this, it is necessary to have accurate, systematic, homogeneous and spatially explicit historical information on the incidence of this phenomenon. The databases present serious limitations in this sense, so other sources of information, such as Geographic Information Technologies (GIT), have become optimal alternatives to generate fire maps at various spatial and temporal scales. Forest fires are a recurring theme during summers in the semi-arid Pampean region. End of the year 2017, beginning of 2018, it was observed in the region that intense fires affected large areas of agricultural livestock and natural areas, which in recent years seemed to be monitored and controlled. The high rainfall that occurs in spring and moderate temperatures are responsible for large accumulations of fine fuel material in the grasslands and, added to this, the lack of livestock in the region to consume it, transforms these areas into systems with high probability of fires. The lack of a sufficiently detailed and exhaustive cartography that includes the spatial delimitation of the burned area, affected species, intensity of damage, among others; prevents having valuable information on the set of factors related to the problem of fires. In this work, taking into account the importance of the use of new technologies, the changes in the land use of the Lihué Calel National Park, caused by the forest fires that developed in the province of La Pampa in the summer of 2017- will be analyzed- 2018. For this, a digital analysis of Landsat 8 OLI images of the study area will be carried out with the Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin (SCP) application of the QGIS software.