Monitoring and Assessing Fire Impacts and Land-cover Change in Tropical and Subtropical Ecosystems Using Satellite Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Abstract

The investigation of fires has been one of the most important topics in the scientific community in the last 25 years. Biomass burning has in fact a critical importance for global biogeochemical cycles and for its interactions with the natural environment at all its hierarchical levels of organization. The scientific community calls for a better understanding of fires distribution and on its role as fundamental agent accompanying natural and anthropogenic processes of modification of the land environment, such as natural habitat conversion and landscape fragmentation. In the present work, after reviewing the main effects of fires on the environment, we proposed some methodologies to monitor and analyse fires at three different environmental scales (sub-continental, landscape, and ecosystem); we aim to emphasize the interrelationships between fires characteristics and land-cover, and investigate the role of biomass burning in accompanying the processes of modification of landscapes and ecosystems