Long-term forest fire assessment over Zagros Forests

Abstract. Wildfires are known as one of the most important natural hazards, adversely impacting the ecosystems and human lives. Monitoring and management of wildfires is necessary to minimize their negative effects. Global burned area products are widely used to study wildfires, but their accuracy is not constant over different environments. In this study, the MCD64A1 burned area product was spatially validated using ground truth maps in a fire-prone Zagros Forest over 2021-2023. Our results indicated that its performance varies temporally, as the Kappa coefficient ranged from 0.04 to 0.69. Overall accuracy was higher than 0.96 percent in all years, indicating that MCD64A1 can be considered as a source for studying wildfires; however, its underestimation should be considered. In the next step, the trend of fire and its relationship with precipitation (i.e., obtained from the CHRIPS dataset) were analyzed in three forest ecosystems from 2001 to 2024. In two regions, Marivan and Kermanshah, wildfires experienced an increasing trend, in contrast to the other region, Shiraz, where they decreased over time. Analyzing the correlation between fire and precipitation revealed that spring precipitation is more connected to burned areas than annual precipitation. Comparing the results of the three regions showed that this matter is also region-related, and the results of one region cannot be referred to another. This study provided information on the performance of MCD64A1 in semiarid forests and the wildfire conditions in the Zagros Mountains to aid wildfire management.