Wildfire Risk Mapping in the Eastern Mongolia using Remote Sensing and Multi Criteria Analysis
Year: 2012-2013
Country: Mongolia
Location within country: Eastern part of Mongolia
This project aimed at mapping the wildfire risk areas in the Eastern part of the country (especially in the Khentii, Sukhbaatar and Dornod provinces), where the wildfire is one of the most important natural hazards in the country causing significant damages to the environment as well as the country’s economy every year.
Descriptions
The study was carried out by analyzing the natural factors (landcover, slope, aspect and distance from rivers), climate factors (air temperature and rainfall), fire factor (burned area frequency), and human factors (distance from settlements, distance from roads). The landcover map was obtained from the MODIS landcover map. The slope and aspect maps were derived from the Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) of the NASA. Active fires and burned areas in the past were derived from ALOS/AVNIR-2 and MODIS data available at the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSC). Climatic, and human factors were collected from the data available at the NRSC and other national agencies of Mongolia. The Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) approach was used to integrate the above-mentioned factors to produce a wildfire risk map by assigning appropriate weights. Results show that 6% of the study area comes under the category of high risk, 4% under medium risk and 90% under low risk to wildfire.