7th Workshop on Forest Fire Management - EARSeL, European ...

SATELLITE DERIVED MULTI-YEAR BURNED AREA PERIMETERS WITHIN
THE NATIONAL PARKS OF ITALY
P.A. Brivio 1 , B. Petrucci 2 , M. Boschetti 1 , P. Carrara 1 , M. Pepe 1 ,
A. Rampini 1 , D. Stroppiana 1 & P. Zaffaroni 1
1 CNR-IREA, Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, Milan, Italy,
brivio.pa@irea.cnr.it; boschetti.m; carrara.p; pepe.m; rampini.a; stroppiana.d; zaffaroni.p
2 Ministero dell’Ambiente, Direzione Protezione Natura, Roma, Italy,
petrucci.bruno@minambiente.it
Abstract: Vegetation fires play a key role in land cover and land use change
and satellite data are a unique source of information for fire monitoring. In
Italy, fires severely affect forest resources and monitoring and mapping
have been recognized as key activities for the prevision, the prevention and
for fighting against fires. We present burned area maps derived mainly from
ASTER satellite images over the National Parks for the period 2001 to 2005.
They are available through an Inspire compliant Web Map Service (WMS) at
the CNR-IREA geo-portal and the the “Portale Cartografico Nazionale” of the
Italian Ministry of the Environment.
1 - Introduction
Land cover and land use dynamics are object of interest due to their key
role in the global carbon cycle and their impacts on climate change. In this
context fire is probably the most important factor driving land cover
changes that occurs in almost all the ecosystems around the World
(Thonicke et al., 2001). Mediterranean countries in Europe, among which
Italy, are particularly affected by vegetation fires during the summer season
when the weather is hot and dry; yet most of them do not have a geographic
database of fire events and only recently remote sensing technology
has been explored for integrating traditional field monitoring (Paganini
et al., 2003; Piccoli and Cattoi, 2007). We present the outcome of a project
funded by the Italian Ministry of the Environment, Direzione Protezione
Natura, that aimed at producing a geo database of the burned perimeters
in the Italian National Parks for the period 2001-2005 from satellite
images.
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