Estudio de los patrones espaciales y temporales de los incendios en el ecuador utilizando variables climáticas actuales y futuras

Abstract

Forest fires are a major part of the problems within an ecosystem, affecting the diversity of flora and fauna in the area. Currently, different spectral indices have been developed for the identification of burned areas, the present research is based on the study of fires that have occurred during the last twenty years in the Republic of Ecuador. In order to study the temporal spatial patterns of fires in Ecuador, we used the databases provided by different governmental organizations dedicated to the management and control of fires, the interpretation of the information was handled by the ArcGis program, in conjunction with the Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 satellites, allowing us to interpret the historical progress, density and intensity of the events that occurred. The development of predictive models for the year 2050 used bioclimatic variables, information provided by the WorldClim platform, and the MaxEnt tool was used to estimate the presence of a phenomenon, using scenarios 2.6, 4.5, 6 and 8.5 for our research. As a result of the research, an updated database was generated with the number of fires occurred in Ecuador, which are represented in different maps that are historical, density and intensity of the last ten years, after the statistical analysis it was determined that the provinces of Azuay, Guayas, Pichincha, Imbabura and Loja are the most representative with 62 % in terms of percentage of events occurred, while the prediction models have a high degree of reliability since the AUC is higher than 0.8. This study concludes that the information obtained through governmental entities, WorldClim, Copernicus and EarthExplorer (USGS) platforms allowed the development of all the objectives set out in this study.