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Characterizing fuel flammability in a tropical dry community forest in Eastern India using laboratory and remote sensing based approaches

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Abstract

Characterizing forest fuel properties in terms of their distribution and flammability behaviour offers useful information for effective fire management. Satellite images provide synoptic images capturing the vegetation state and their change including burn area loss, enabling stratification, and narrowing down the search for further investigation on ground or laboratory. The study investigated the flammability of various forest fuels including sal, teak, bamboo and grass species, by analysing different fuel variables such as moisture content (MC), volatile matter (VM), ash content (AC), fixed carbon (FC), higher heating value (HHV) and minimum ignition temperature (MIT), and exploring the intrinsic relationships between and among them. The teak wood showed low MC (5.08%), high VM (81.91%), low AC (1.1%), high HHV (19.93 MJ/kg), high CF (93.82) indicating high sustainability, combustibility and consumability characteristics. Teak indicated higher flammability characteristics compared to sal, while grass indicated higher sustainability and combustibility characteristics compared to bamboo. Overall woody species (sal and teak) indicated high ignitability and sustainability characteristics over grass and bamboo. Among the plant components, leaves indicated high ignitability, wood indicated high sustainability, combustibility and consumability, and barks indicated low flammability characteristics. This study registers a maiden and early attempt using satellite and laboratory-based analysis to characterize the flammability properties of dominant species of tropical dry forests in eastern India.

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All the supporting data for the findings of this study are included within this journal paper.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the authority of Department of Mining Engineering and CORAL, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur for providing the required facilities and essential equipment for this study. Satyajit Behera is grateful to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India for providing financial assistance through the ‘Computational Fluid Dynamics’ project for forest fuel studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mining Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, 721302, India

    Satyajit Behera & Basanta Kumar Prusty

  2. Centre for Ocean, River, Atmosphere and Land Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, 721302, India

    Mukunda Dev Behera

  3. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Pune, Maharashtra, 411008, India

    Manish Prabhakar Kale

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  1. Satyajit Behera
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  2. Basanta Kumar Prusty
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  3. Mukunda Dev Behera
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Correspondence to Basanta Kumar Prusty.

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Behera, S., Prusty, B.K., Behera, M.D. et al. Characterizing fuel flammability in a tropical dry community forest in Eastern India using laboratory and remote sensing based approaches. Trop Ecol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42965-023-00309-6

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