The effect of forest fire on mass movement in Lebanese mountainous areas
2014
Ziade, R. | Abdallah, Cosette, | Baghdadi, N.
Mass Movement (MM) is one of the main natural hazards that threaten both the natural and human environments of Lebanon. Their occurrence has increased by almost 60% between 1956 and 2008. Similarly, Forest Fire (FF) has emerged to impose as another hazard that destroyed over 25 % of Lebanon's forests in less than 40 years. This paper investigates the potential impact of FF on MM occurrence in Damour and Nahr Ibrahim watersheds in Lebanon. MM and FF inventory maps were produced through Remote Sensing (RS) using aerial and satellite images. FF was introduced as the inducing factor whose impact was extracted from Landsat images through the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) index. A field study was carried out in order to substantiate the MM inventory and the burn index maps. Following the standardization of the impact factors into layers using Geographic Information System (GIS), weight factor of each layer for inducing MM has been evaluated using modified InfoVal method and a MM Susceptibility Map (MMSM) was generated. Preceded only by Land Cover change, NBR obtained the highest weight making FF burn severity the second highest impacting factor on MM occurrence in our study areas.
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