Journal of Geography and Cartography (2018) Volume 1 doi:10.24294/jgc.v1i2.753 1 (Online First)Determination of Fire Extent in Forest Zones Using Remote Sensing Data Case Study: Golestan Province of Iran Akram Karimi, Meysam Madadi, Sara Abdollahi, Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari, Saeid Eslamian, Vijay P. Singh MSc Student of Environmental Science, Evaluation Land Use Planning, Karaj Environmental Faculty, Karaj, Iran Department of Environmental Sciences, Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Gorgan, Iran MSc of Environmental Science, Environmental Science Department, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran. Department of Civil Engineering, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran. Department of Water Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran. Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A and M University, ABSTRACT Fire is one of the most serious hazards, which causes many economic, social, ecological, and human damages every year in the world. Fire in forests and natural ecosystems destroys wood, regeneration, forest vegetation, as well as soil erosion and forest regeneration problems (due to the dryness of the weather and the weakness of the soil). Awareness of the extent of the zones that have been fired is important for forest management. On the other hand, the difficulty of fieldwork due to the high cost and inaccessible roads, etc. reveals the need for using remote sensing science to solve this problem. In this research, MODIS satellite images were used to detect and determine the fire extent of Golestan province forests in northern Iran. MID13q1 and MOD13q1 images were used to detect the normal conditions of the environment. The 15-year time series data were provided for the NDVI and NDMI indicators in 2000-2015. Then, the behavior of indicators in the fire zone was studied on the day after the fire. The burned zones by the fire were specified by determining the appropriate threshold and then, they were compared to long-term normals. In the NDMI and NDVI indicators, the mean of the numeric value threshold limit for determining the burnt pixels was respectively 1.865 and 0.743 of the reduction in their normal long-term period, which are selected as fire pixels. The results showed that the NDMI index could determine the extent of the burned zone with the accuracy of 95.15%. Keywords:Fire; satellite; fire extent; MODIS; time series 1. Introduction The fire destroys a huge volume of wood and the elements in the forest in a short time. Fire heat causes the destruction of plants and animals (Brown & Davis, 1959). The main factors affecting the spread of forest fires include climate (moisture, temperature), topography (slope, direction, and altitude), vegetation type and density, distribution, and density of population, road, etc. (ZHANG et al., 2003; RAJEEV et al., 2002). Some of the damages caused by fire in the forest are the reduction or eliminating the value of the forest, the destruction of forest sapling, damaging the productive power of the earth, reducing the forest protection value, damaging the forest soil, damaging the forest beauty, damaging the forage value, destruction of non-domestic animals, and damaging the forest soil. Fire is considered as an integral part of natural ecosystems. In any case, the natural areas intentionally or unintentionally caught fire. Fire uses natural fuels, such as mulch, branches of plants and trees, etc., can easily spread in the natural area (Brown and Davis, 1959). The conducted studies in this regard are as follows: Copyright © 2018 Akram Karimi et al. doi: 10.24294/jgc.v1i2.753 EnPress Publisher LLC.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/