Quantifying post-fire vegetation loss and trace gas emissions from the July 2025 Çeşme wildfire using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-5P

Aegean and Mediterranean countries have been experiencing many forest fires which caused extensive ecological damage and posed significant risks to habitants in recent years due to extreme temperature anomalies. Post-fire analyses are essential for rapidly assessing wildfire impacts and informing future mitigation strategies. This study investigates the effects of the Çeşme wildfire in İzmir, Türkiye, which began on July 2, 2025, and lasted four days, using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-5P satellite imagery. Changes in vegetation conditions were examined using normalized difference moisture index (NDMI), normalized burn ratio index (NBR), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and green chlorophyll vegetation index on the Google Earth Engine cloud-based platform. Burned area extent was quantified using differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) while changes of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) gases were extracted from Sentinel-5P TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument satellite data. The study results demonstrated that 96.21 km2 was burned around Çeşme. The statistical relationships of NBR with NDMI and NDVI were lower after the fire. The average NDVI decreased from 0.39 to 0.25 and the average NBR decreased from 0.19 to 0.09, indicating the damage caused by the fire to the vegetation. The study findings highlighted the huge amount of forest destroyed due to wildfire. It has been shown that NO2 and CO gases were released into the atmosphere at high rates during the wildfire. The study represents a powerful application of spatial information science in disaster management through the integration of various remote sensing indicators.