Forests equal to the size of India burnt annually: Study

This is an area equivalent to the European Union and larger than the size of India. The information is considered vital for scientists and agencies involved in monitoring global warming, measuring and understanding pollutants in the atmosphere, managing forests and controlling fire and even for predicting future fire occurrence.

The research has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Prior to this, data was only available for the year 2000. “We have produced, for the first time, a global data base and map of the occurrence of fire scars covering the period 2000-2007,” Tansey, a Lecturer in Remote Sensing at the Department of Geography, said.

Though it was not possible to determine if there is an increasing trend in the occurrence of fire with seven years of data, but year-to-year differences of the order of 20 per cent, have been noticed, he said.

“This unique data set is in much demand by a large community of scientists interested in climate change, vegetation monitoring, atmospheric chemistry and carbon storage and flows,” Tansey said.

The team used the VEGETATION instrument onboard the SPOT European satellite, which collects reflected solar energy from the Earth’s surface, providing global coverage on almost a daily basis.

“When vegetation burns, the amount of reflected energy is altered, long enough for us to make an observation of the fire scar. Supercomputers located in Belgium were used to process the vast amounts of satellite data used in the project”, he added.

The team discovered that the majority of fires occur in Africa. Large swathes of savannah grasslands are cleared every year, up to seven times burnt in the period 2000-2007.