Comparación entre focos de calor y cicatrices de quema de la reserva de producción de fauna Chimborazo durante el periodo 2015-2019.

Abstract

This research aimed to compare 220 heat sources extracted from the platform FIRMS with 42 burn scars obtained from the records of the Ministry of the Environment of Ecuador (MEE), in the period 2015-2019 in the Chimborazo Fauna Production Reserve, (CFPR) through a spatiotemporal analysis, collecting geographic coordinates according to the availability of the MODIS and VIIRS sensors. ArcGis 10.5 software was used for the projection of the points, with help of the tool "Conversion Tools", "Excel To Table", transforming the heat sources into shapefile using a square buffer (area of influence) depending on the pixel of each sensor, 1 km for the MODIS sensor, and 375 m for the VIIRS sensor. The magnitude of each fire to validate the heat sources considering as "right ones" those points that had spatio-temporal concordance with burn scars and as "wrong ones" those that do not complied with said agreement, also considering their registration date and plant cover affected. This study showed that of the total heat sources analyzed there was a greater number of "right ones" within the RPFCH in areas greater than 1 ha; reported "wrong ones" were found mainly in the buffer zone. It could also be shown that the sensor VIIRS presented a greater number of heat sources compared to the MODIS sensor. It was concluded that the fact that there was a greater number of detected heat sources did not imply that it contained all the events as it could be verified in the individual validations. Therefore, the validation proved to be an inefficient methodology due to the lack of precision of the data when comparing them. It is recommended for future studies to use spatial imagery to estimate burned areas from a multitemporal perspective in the RPFCH taking into account the climatic conditions of the place.