Wildfire Severity Mapping Using Sentinel Satellite Data Based on Machine Learning Approaches

In South Korea with forest as a major land cover class (over 60% of the country), many wildfires occur every year. Wildfires weaken the shear strength of the soil, forming a layer of soil that is vulnerable to landslides. It is important to identify the severity of a wildfire as well as the burned area to sustainably manage the forest. Although satellite remote sensing has been widely used to map wildfire severity, it is often difficult to determine the severity using only the temporal change of satellite-derived indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR). In this study, we proposed an approach for determining wildfire severity based on machine learning through the synergistic use of Sentinel-1A Synthetic Aperture Radar-C data and Sentinel-2A Multi Spectral Instrument data. Three wildfire cases-Samcheok in May 2017, Gangreung . Donghae in April 2019, and Gosung . Sokcho in April 2019-were used for developing wildfire severity mapping models with three machine learning algorithms (i.e., Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine). The results showed that the random forest model yielded the best performance, resulting in an overall accuracy of 82.3%. The cross-site validation to examine the spatiotemporal transferability of the machine learning models showed that the models were highly sensitive to temporal differences between the training and validation sites, especially in the early growing season. This implies that a more robust model with high spatiotemporal transferability can be developed when more wildfire cases with different seasons and areas are added in the future.