## 1 Introduction  
Commercial plantation forests in South Africa are repeatedly exposed to various disturbances such as insect pests [1], and disease [2], invasive alien species [3], drought stress [4], and fire [5]. Of these, fire constitutes the greatest threat to the sustainability of the country's forestry industry as it accounts for nearly 87% of the losses suffered by commercial plantations [5]. This warrants concern because nearly 600,000 ha of damaged plantations has been attributed to forest fires since 1980 [5], and this problem is expected to increase with climate warming. The impact of forest fires has a large bearing on the country's economy; for example, the 2017 fires in the Southern Cape Forestry region cost R2 billion (USD 134,998,460) to the South African insurance industry [6]. Additional costs are incurred when trees younger than harvesting age are accidentally burned, which then require filling, clearing, and replanting [5]. Moreover, forest fires are known to influence atmospheric processes by freeing large quantities of carbon [7], provoke plants with in -vasive characteristics [8], alter forest structure [9], and threaten the lives of communities living on the periphery of forested areas [10]. The formulation of suppression and monitoring strategies against forest fires necessitates reliable information on fire behavior, particularly with regard to those factors that create favorable conditions for fire outbreaks [11; 12]. Several studies have associated forest fires with a variety of factors such as forest canopy fuels [13], amplified sources of ignition linked to the human population [14], the proliferation of flammable plants [15] and drought [16; 17]. Hitherto, a growing number of studies report the increase in forest fires in the tropics and subtropics during extended drought conditions [18; 19; 20; 21]. These conditions are typical of the forestry region of South Africa in the Western Cape province [22], where this study is conducted. The vulnerability of this region to destructive forests fires is attributed to the synergistic effects of drought and flammable fynbos vegetation, which simultaneously are conducive to fires [23]. This is a great concern to the stability of the forestry industry [24] since the probability of similar fires in the future is growing [25]. During late October and early November 2018, relatively dry weather conditions prevailed over the southern Cape forestry region and created favorable conditions for forest fires that destroyed extensive areas of plantation forests [26]. Two wildfires occurred in succession, the first broke from human-induced point ignition on the 24 th October and the second incident was ignited by lightning on the 29 th October [26]. This was by far the most intense and widespread fire incident, surpassing all wildfires in this region in the previous century [27]. What may exacerbate matters further is that trees damaged by fires are prone to diseases, and may add additional management costs to the forestry industry [28]. As such, forest fires have become a common feature of the Southern Cape forestry region and an inevitable consequence of the country's fire-prone vegetation and warm, dry climate [28]. Hitherto, information on burned land use/cover classes in this area remains inconclusive, and this provides a partial explanation of why this study was purposefully devised. The assessment of forest fire generally involves field surveys, which are efficiently conducted for small areas [29]. However, the assessment of forest damage in larger areas is difficult and expensive [30]. Given the expected rise in forest fires globally [31], innovative computing approaches using remote sensing are required to deliver quicker and affordable evaluations of larger affected areas [32] and have been successfully adopted to evaluate burn severity worldwide [33; 34; 35]. Remote sensing enables the systematic and flexible recording of burned areas and also provides insights into the agents responsible for these outcomes [36].