Using GIS to Develop a Model for Forest Fire Risk Mapping

Forests are the most beautiful natural resources around the world and play a pivotal role in preserving environmental balance. An important measure taken for managing and protecting forest areas as well as for decreasing the potential damages caused by the fire is the detection of regions susceptible to forest fire through forest fire risk mapping with different models and methods. In recent years, a geographic information system (GIS)-based multi-criteria decision analyses (MCDA) have been successfully applied in the production of forest fire risk maps. In this study, GIS-based analytical network process as MCDA method was employed in order to provide the fire risk map of Noshahr Forests (North Iran) using slope, slope aspect, altitude, land cover, normalized difference vegetation index, annual rainfall, annual temperature, distance to settlements, and distance to road as input data. Furthermore, to prepare the map of the distribution of occurred fires, MODIS fire product and wide-field observations were used. Thereafter, each of these subcriteria of the utilized factors was standardized according to their significance in a forest fire and then with the extracted coefficients in the analytical network process model merged in ArcGIS software. Finally, the fire risk map was generated. Evaluation of the results obtained using receiver operating characteristic curve indicated that the designed model has good accuracy with a value of under curve area of 0.783. According to the map prepared, 57.45% of the study area (1034.41 km2) is located in the high and very high-risk classes.