Mapping Burned Areas with Remote Sensing Techniques: A GIS Based Study of the 2025 Monte Sara Forest Fire (Sicily, Italy)

Remote sensing techniques are useful tools for mapping burned areas, allowing for the rapid monitoring of large areas, even in hard-to-reach locations. Sensors that acquire multispectral data allow for the analysis of changes in vegetation reflectivity (infrared and red bands) after a fire, enabling near-real-time mapping of burned areas to support post-fire management, damage assessment, and recovery planning. This article describes the methodological approaches used to map the burned areas in the fire that affected Monte Sara Forest (Sicily, Italy) in August 2025. Three different indices are applied on Sentinel-2 imageries acquired before and after the fire, i.e., Burnt Area Index (BAI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and a change detection technique, specifically image difference, is used to identify burned areas. In all three cases, the test sites demonstrate high accuracy in the mapping results; the NBR-based approach allows achieving an overall accuracy of 0.993.