EXPLORING BURN SEVERITY OF SEASONAL FIRE IN YANKARI NATIONAL PARK, NIGERIA, USING LANDSAT DATA

Abstract

Fire is generally used as an environmental management tool around the world but it also has devastating impacts on biodiversity and may cause drastic changes to carbon, energy and water fluxes. Although parks and games reserves are demarcated and protected from undue human influences such as fires, fires have continued to impact these protected areas. In many developing countries with poor data collection capacities, the use of Remote Sensing technologies offers a credible solution to monitoring the health of the environment. In this paper we apply the normalized difference burn ratio (dNBR) to Landsat 5 images for the dry season months to explore burn severity of fire in Yankari Games Reserve in Northern Central Nigeria. The games reserve is one of the most popular and well-known reserves in the West African sub- region. Results suggest that fires are started at the edges of the park, where many settlements are now established and spread towards the central area, which shows less severity probably as efforts are made to combat it. This pattern of spread may be responsible for the observed distribution of wildlife in the reserves in the dry season, with large concentrations at the center of the reserves. This has implications for policy at several levels including restrictions on settlements and farming activities within or near the reserve.