{"id":7436,"date":"2022-07-11T18:38:06","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T10:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/?p=7436"},"modified":"2026-08-04T14:40:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T06:40:28","slug":"monitoring-forest-fires-with-satellites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/monitoring-forest-fires-with-satellites\/","title":{"rendered":"Monitoring forest fires with satellites"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Between November 2015 and April 2016, over 36,000 hectare of forest was burnt in the Republic of Congo. The main commercial activity in the area is the extraction of round wood from areas leased from the national authorities by private companies. These cover an extensive part of forest in the north of the country including the Marantaceae forests, which were affected by the fires.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"How satellite image helped detect forest fire in Congo\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oimEGpyTpxM?feature=oembed\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n<p>Source:\u00a0Verhegghen et al, 2016<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While it is usually too humid for forests to burn in the area, a very strong El Ni\u00f1o caused a high number of fires to spread at the beginning of 2016. During peak times, \u00a0the fires were spreading as fast as 1,600 hectares a day, making it especially dangerous to track through conventional ways.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Congolese forests are not only the primary habitat for many large mammals, such as gorillas and forest elephants, but they are also an important carbon storage for the world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In order to determine the source of the fires and help monitor the spread to better allocate resources to combat and prevention, a consortium, led by the Joint Research Centre\u00a0used satellite data from both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2\u00a0\u2014\u00a0each satellite\u2019s sensor compensating for the difficulty of the other (cloud perturbations for Sentinel-2 and sensitivity to ground moisture for Sentinel-1).<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cBurnt areas mapped by Sentinel-1\u2019s synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2\u2019s multispectral imagery highlighted that the origin of the fires correlates with accessibility to the forest, suggesting they were caused by human activity.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With a temporal resolution of 10 days and a spatial resolution of 10 m, Sentinel-2A images allow the timing and extent of fire events to be mapped precisely.\u00a0This is an improvement on the temporal resolution of 16 days and spatial resolution of 30 m that Landsat-8 provides.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"PDq2pG_selectionAnchorContainer\" data-start=\"30\" data-end=\"314\">Combining multiple satellite data sources can reveal critical insights for monitoring and responding to environmental challenges. However, turning Earth Observation data into effective operational solutions requires selecting the right technologies, workflows, and analysis methods.<\/p>\n<p data-start=\"319\" data-end=\"620\">Through our Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) approach, we help organizations design tailored satellite intelligence solutions that address real-world challenges such as wildfire monitoring, environmental protection, and resource management. Learn more about our FDE program: <a class=\"decorated-link\" href=\"https:\/\/starpath.global\/fde\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\" data-start=\"593\" data-end=\"620\">https:\/\/starpath.global\/fde<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Between November 2015 and April 2016, over 36,000 hectare of forest was burnt in the Republic of Congo. The main commercial activity in the area is the extraction of round wood from areas leased from the national authorities by private companies. These cover an extensive part of forest in the north of the country including [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5562,9941,9940],"class_list":["post-7436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-fires","tag-forest","tag-forest-fires"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7436"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51420,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7436\/revisions\/51420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}