Characterizing Vegetation Fire dynamics in Myanmar and South Asian Countries

Fire is among the major disasters leading to biodiversity loss and climate change. Analysing high temporal resolution data over space and time can provide critical inputs for environmental management. The present study attempted to analyse fire occurrences to determine the distribution of vegetation fire hotspots in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. The spatial statistics and space–time pattern mining tools are used for investigating fire trends that occurred across vegetated landscapes over a period of 16 years. This study found a total of 2,352,063 active vegetation fire locations using daily MODIS data from 2003 to 2018. Mann–Kendall test has identified the statistically significant trend of fire hotspots across forests, scrub, grasslands, agriculture, and plantations. The emerging hotspot analysis detected considerable spatial variation across fire hotspots and identified the geographical clusters of fire hotspots across the South Asian countries and Myanmar. The fires showed variations with an increasing or decreasing trend or no statistically significant trend in different land cover types across the eight countries. The emerging hotspot analysis found the dominance of sporadic hotspots and persistent hotspots.