historical forest fire occurrence analysis in jambi ... · 454 lilik budi prasetyo et al. /...

Procedia Environmental Sciences 33 ( 2016 ) 450 – 459

1878-0296 © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of LISAT-FSEM2015doi: 10.1016/j.proenv.2016.03.096

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The 2nd International Symposium on LAPAN-IPB Satellite for Food Security and Environmental Monitoring 2015, LISAT-FSEM 2015

Historical forest fire occurrence analysis in Jambi Province during the period of 2000 – 2015: its distribution & land cover trajectories

Lilik Budi Prasetyoa,*, Arya H. Dharmawanb, Fredian T. Nasdianb, S. Ramdhonia a Department of Forest Resources Conservation & Ecotourism-Faculty of Forestry, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), Jl Meranti, Dramaga,

Bogor 16680, Indonesia b Department of Human Ecology, Faculty of Agriculture, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), Jl Meranti, Dramaga, Bogor 16680, Indonesia

Abstract

Forest and land fire in Indonesia have been given much attention since it creates environmental problems every year. Instead of its negative impacts, fire cannot be separated from agricultural system in the tropics. Moreover, under the regulation, the farmer is allowed to use fire for land preparation under 2 hectares. However, fire utilization is prohibited for land preparation in concessionaries. In facts, some companies are utilized fire for economics reason even though some of them are refused to admit. Therefore, it is interesting to know on what is really occur in the field related to the fire occurrence. Objectives of the research are to determine distribution of fire occurrence based on historical hot spot data during 15 years period (2001-2015), and analysis land cover as well as land use trajectories before and after fire occurrence in Jambi Province. Result showed, fire tend to occur in peat land every year, either during El Niño or La Niña period. Land covers before fire occurrence mostly were bush and disturbed secondary forest. It was also revealed that fire was also utilized by companies (oil palm and forest plantation). During period of analysis, on average, 20.67% was converted into forest plantation and 27.06% was converted into palm oil plantation, meanwhile the rest areas (52.27%) were community land area. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of LISAT-FSEM2015.

Keywords: forest and land fire; Jambi; hotspot; land cover; trajectory

* Corresponding author. Tel: +62-812-133-5130.

E-mail address: [email protected].

© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of LISAT-FSEM2015

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451 Lilik Budi Prasetyo et al. / Procedia Environmental Sciences 33 ( 2016 ) 450 – 459

1. Introduction

Forest and land fire has been given very much attention due to its great impact on the environment. Fire contributed to deforestation rate [1], habitat loss & species extinction [2] as well as greenhouse gases emission [3]. In 1997/1998, during the El Niño anomaly event there were 790 thousand hectares of forest disappear and release of about 0.81 – 2.57 Gton CO2 e to the atmosphere [4] and its transboundary haze has created environment problems in neighboring countries [5]. Instead of its negative impacts, fire cannot be separated with the agricultural practices in the tropics. Shifting cultivators used to use fire as part of their cultivation technique. From the view point of farmers, burning will create space for crops planting, provide ash as a fertilizer, improve soil structure enabling faster sowing of seed, reduce weed competition, reduce occurrence of pest and disease [6]. However, recently fire also have been applied in large areas for land preparation of companies/concession, in order to minimize production cost [7]. During El Niño anomaly period, such kind activities might result in large uncontrolled forest and land fire, especially on dried peat soil. In the context of forest management, forest and land fire should be anticipated at the early stage. Regarding to REDD+ mechanism, forest and land fire is considered as risk and have to be taken into account seriously. To anticipate the fire occurrence, vulnerability forest and land fire mapping has been promoted based on weight & score of variables, such as physical factor, biomass, and disturbances (distance from human activities). Variables’ weight and score to some extend are made based on theoretical knowledge and assumptions which are not based on fire occurrence in particular area and therefore resulted in inaccurate and mismatch with the fire occurrence in that area.

Global forest fire monitoring has been becoming very efficient by the availability of real time fire active data derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) sensor on board of Terra-Aqua satellites [8]. The MODIS active fire has resolution of 1 x 1 km. It has been widely used for National official hotspot monitoring and information, such as Indonesia. It was also applied for Global burn scar estimation [9]. Objective of this research is to determine distribution of fire occurrence based on historical hot spot data during 15 years period (2001-2015), as such fire occurrence probability in particular area can be determined. The second objective is to analysis land cover and land use trajectories before and after fire occurrence. This will help to understand process and intention of drivers to use fire. Hopefully, the research result would be used to improve policy development to mitigate forest and land fire occurrence and determine priority areas. Jambi province was taken as a case due to its vulnerability to fire among other provinces in Sumatera Island.

2. Materials and Method

2.1. Study site

Study site is situated in Jambi Province (Fig. 1). The province consists of flat lowland area in the eastern and mountainous/hilly areas in the western part. The remaining forest in the area is in lowland area in the form of fresh water swamp and peat swamp forest, meanwhile the mountainous and hilly are upland forest. In the flat area, land cover was dominated by mixed between upland agriculture and bush. This is typical land cover of shifting cultivation, indicated by varies stages of secondary vegetation. As the main tree in shifting cultivation in Jambi is rubber (Hevea brasiliensis). Some researches called such kind of land cover as rubber jungle [10]. Other land cover on this flat area is oil palm plantation.

2.2. Historical data of forest and land fire

Hotspot data during the period of 2001 – 2015 of Jambi Province were downloaded from MODIS active fire data [8]. The hotspot data were selected by 80% confidence level of threshold value. The threshold value is higher compare to research result in Kalimantan, in which forest fire occurrence in the field were correlated with hotspot confidence level higher than 50% [11].


Fig. 1. Jambi Province.

2.3. Distribution of hotspot

Hotspot distribution were analyzed by using Getis-Ord-Gi* statistic, a spatial analysis tool in ArcGIS software (Formula 1, 2, and 3). Since the input data was point feature (hotspot data), the tools will do clustering of hotspot points based on the number of hotspot occurrence points per grid (fishnet) that derived automatically during processing. Then the tools determine statistically significant spatial clusters of high values (called as hot spots), low values (called as cold spots) and not significance area. Further the hotspot and cold spot area was classified into 90%, 95% and 99% probability occurrence. (1) (2) (3) where: x j is the attribute value for feature j, w i,j is the spatial weight between feature i and j, n is equal to the total number of feature.


2.4. Land cover & land cover identification

Land cover identification were performed based on visual classification of Landsat Imageries (TM, ETM and OLI), taken in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Classification technique was relied on key identification of object such as on color, tone, size, shape, texture, pattern, site and association. Land use and land cover before fire occurrence were determined based on Landsat data approximately a year before fire occurrence (hotspot acquisition), meanwhile land use and land cover after occurrence were determined based on Landsat taken 3 years after fire occurrence. This period of time is determined for the sake of clarity to identify land-use type.

3. Results and Discussion

3.1. Distribution of hotspot

Between 2001-2015 periods, there were 26623 hotspot occurrences in Jambi. Among them 5185 occurrences were selected, in which is having probability 80% of confidence level. Fire has been utilized in land clearing in Jambi [7] and therefore, it is not surprising every year during 2001 – 2015, fire occurrence could be detected. Hotspot occurred either during drought condition of El Niño in the year of 2004, 2006, 2009 and 2015 or wet condition of La Niña in the year of 2001, 2007, 2008, 2011, and 2012. Based on historical hotspot occurrence (Fig. 2), it seems that there was no relationship between climate anomalies with the number of hotspot after 2010. In 2011 and 2012 huge number of hotspot was detected even though the period was during wet condition of La Niña. This condition has made difficulties to predict forest fire based climatic factor as suggested by Spessa et al. [12] and Wooster et al. [13].

Peat land area is only about 12 % of Jambi Provinces, however of about 79 % points hotspot were situated in peat area, especially at surrounding Berbak National Park. Base on Gi* spatial statistic, this area have occurrence confidence level more than 90%, and defined as hotspot area, meanwhile most of mineral soil area were not significance (Fig. 3). This fact is surprising since under normal condition, peat land is inundated and therefore is hardly burned. Only under condition of drained peat easily burned. Large number of hotspot occurrence on peat even in La Niña season indicated that the peat ecosystem has already disturbed and drained. This might relate with the canal development for agricultural area, especially oil palm plantation and forest plantation. In Riau Province, Suyanto et al. [7] found that oil palm plantation, Forest plantation and settlement development were commonly caused by forest fire. Canal development without considering peat elevation and support by proper management will cause over drained of peat land that leads to forest fire since the peat became highly combustible.

3.2. Trajectory of land cover before and after forest fire

Fire may occur when fire triangle are exist together, namely biomass (fuel), oxygen, and fire ignition/heat. The amount of biomass can be represented by the land cover, meanwhile the source of ignition of fire in the tropics mostly are originated from human activities due to some reason, such as land clearing for swidden agriculture, plantation or forest plantation [14]. By observing satellite data before and after fire incidence, the reason behind fire ignition can be estimated. During 2001 to 2015, land cover before the hotspot occurrence in every year mostly were the same, in which dominated by grass and bush, followed by secondary forest, upland Agriculture & forest plantation. On average, during 15 years analysis, land cover before fire occurrence was grass and shrubs (61.03%) and secondary forest (24.60%) (Table 1).


Fig. 2. Hotspot number during 2001 – 2015.

Fig. 3. Hotspot occurrence distribution during 2001 – 2015.

Fire occurrence on secondary forest and bush was precedented by logging or land clearing activities. Fig. 4 shows clearly logging operation before forest fire which occurred in 2004, meanwhile in Fig. 5, fire was used for land clearing of bush. In this case, the intention of using fire was not for plantation or forest plantation, because till 2015 both of the lands were left in the form of bush. Bushes or unmanaged land is highly combustible and very susceptible to fire. Very frequent forest fire occur in such kind of area [11].

Base on Law no 32/2009 on Protection and Management of the Environment (Perlindungan dan Pengelolaan Lingkungan Hidup), fire control burning is still allowed to be used for land preparation under 2 Ha. However, for the reason of minimizing operation cost, companies were using fire for land preparation [15]. This was also happen in Jambi province as presented in Fig. 6, Fig. 7 and Fig. 8. Fig. 6 clearly explain process of forest plantation


development from land clearing and road/canal construction that was started in 2002 followed by fire occurrence in 2004. After fire, in 2005, 2006 and 2015, process of tree plantation growing and harvesting could be observed by looking at the changing of color and tone of the images.

Fig. 4. Trajectory from secondary forest to bush: false color composite of Landsat (a) in 2002, (b) 2003, (c) 2004, overlaid with 80% confidence of hotspot in 2004 (white circle), (d) 2005, (e) 2008 and (f) 2015.

Table 1. Percentage of hotspot in Jambi by the year 2001 – 2015 based on land cover before occurrence.

Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 was represented of oil palm plantation development from secondary forest and bush, respectively. Before massive fire occurrence in 2004, land preparation such as land clearing, canal/road development could be identified in both figures. Several years after fire, the growth stages of oil palm also could be monitored, indicated by the changing tone and color of the images.

The analysis of land cover after fire was conducted three years after the incident. By that period most of vegetation was classified as bush (Table 2). Interestingly to note that if we look at land use category, after fire occurrence on average 20.67% was converted into forest plantation and 27.06% was converted into oil palm plantation. The rest areas (52.27%) were community land and unmanaged land (Table 3). This condition proved that fire was not only used by the farmer, but also companies.

a b c

f e d


Fig. 5. Trajectory from bush to bush: false color composite of Landsat taken in (a) 2002, (b) 2003, (c) 2004, overlaid with 80% confidence of hotspot in 2004 (white circle), (c) 2005 (d) 2008, (e) 2013 and (f) 2014.

Fig. 6. Trajectory from secondary forest and bush to forest plantation: false color composite of Landsat taken in (a) 2001, (b) 2002, (c) 2004, overlaid with 80% confidence of hotspot in 2004 (white circle), (d) 2005, (e) 2006, and (f) 2013.

a b c

d e f

a b c

d e f


Fig. 7. Trajectory from secondary forest to oil palm plantation: false color composite of Landsat taken in (a) 2002, (b) 2004, overlaid with 80% confidence of hotspot in 2004 (white circle), (c) 2005 (d) 2008, (e) 2013, and (f) 2014.

Fig. 8. Trajectory from bush to oil palm, false color composite of Landsat taken in (a) 2002, (b) 2003, (c) 2004, overlaid with 80% confidence of hotspot in 2004 (white circle), (c) 2005, (d) 2008, (e) 2013 and (f) 2014.

a b c

d e f

a b c

d e f


Table 2. Percentage of hotspot in Jambi by the year 2001 – 2015 based on land cover after occurrence.

Table 3. Percentage of hotspot in Jambi by the year 2001 – 2015 based on land use after occurrence.

4. Conclusion

Between 2001-2015 periods, there were 26,623 hotspot occurrences in Jambi, in which 5,185 occurrences having probability 80% of confidence level. Fire tends to occur in peat land every year, either during El Niño or La Niña period. Land cover before fire occurrence mostly was bush and disturbed secondary forest. Fire was also utilized by companies (oil palm and forest plantation) for land preparation. During period of analysis, 20.67% of the post fire incidence area was converted into forest plantation and 27.06% was converted into palm oil plantation, meanwhile the rest areas (52.27%) were small holder/community land area. This finding proved that fire was used either by community or by companies for land clearing activities.

Acknowledgements

The research is funded by the Ministry of Research, Technology & Higher Education of Indonesia, under Research Grant No. 630/IT3.11/PL/2015 for the first batch. The authors would like to convey gratitude for continuous support.

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