Investigation of Changes and Feasibility of Indirect Estimation of Soil Organic Carbon in Rangelands after Wildfire (Case Study: Gonbad Watershed, Hamadan)

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of wildfire in the rangelands of the Gonbad region of Hamedan on soil organic carbon storage in two control and fire areas after three years of fire, and the feasibility of using remote sensing in indirect estimation of soil carbon. Therefore, 20 soil surface (0-10cm depth) samples were collected from the burned area and 20 samples from the control area (40 samples in total) by the systematically random method after three years of fire time. Changes in organic carbon, total nitrogen, acidity, and salinity of surface soil were tested by independent t-test between control and fire areas. Then, to investigate the linear relationship between the storage of soil organic carbon with other parameters, the Pearson correlation was used in SPSS v. 26. The results of the independent t-test showed that there was no significant difference in EC, acidity, and soil organic carbon of the control and fire areas, but the amount of total soil nitrogen showed significantly different. The results showed a significant positive correlation was observed between soil organic carbon and total nitrogen at the level of one-hundredth of 0.830 (p< 0.01) in the fire area, and the BI index showed a significant negative correlation of 0.727 (p< 0.05). In the control area, a significant positive relationship was observed between organic carbon and total nitrogen at the rate of 0.627 (p <0.05). The results of processing Landsat 8 images (OLI-TIRS sensor) in the fire area showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between soil organic carbon and light and wetness index obtained from tasseled cap (-0.726 and 0.674, respectively) and PC1 component obtained from principal component analysis and -0.724 (p <.05). These results indicate that it is possible to use tasseled cap images to predict soil organic carbon in fire areas.