Assessing the Impact of Forest Fires on LULC Changes and LST: Case Study of Kavaklidere, Mugla

Year 2025, Volume: 11 Issue: 2, 192 - 200, 25.12.2025

Eda Aşci , Burak Arıcak , Hakan Şevik

https://doi.org/10.33904/ejfe.1786461

Abstract

The Mediterranean region of the Türkiye is among the areas most susceptible to forest fires. Although the reasons for fire outbreaks vary over time, these events consistently result in the loss of forest resources and significant ecological damage. Forest fires reduce or eliminate many forms of vegetation from the land surface. The Kavaklıdere-Muğla-Yatağan-Yılanlı fire, which occurred between 2 and 8 August 2021, affected a large area. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the land use and land cover (LULC) changes in 2020, 2021, and 2024 within Kavaklıdere district of Muğla. In this study, six LULC classes, Agriculture (A), Bare and Other (BO), Forest (F), Urban (U), Water (W) and Burnt Area (BA) were identified using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and random forest classification technique on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. In addition, land surface temperature (LST) data were obtained using the split-window algorithm applied to Landsat-8 data. The findings indicated that LULC changes are clearly in fire-affected areas, with LST values are notably higher in burned areas than in other classes. The results demonstrate the utility of remote sensing techniques for monitoring post-fire changes in land cover and surface temperature.

Keywords

Remote sensing , Forest fire , GIS , Classification , Land surface temperature

Ethical Statement

All data used in this research were obtained from publicly available satellite imagery and secondary sources, which comply with ethical standards. The authors confirm that there are no ethical concerns regarding the conduct of this study.

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