FOREST FIRE HAZARD IDENTIFYING. MAPPING USING SATELLITE IMAGERY-GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM AND ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS: BARTIN, TURKEY

Abstract

Forest fire hazard areas that increasing day by day due to climate change and global warming were identified and mapped by integrating GIS-based and multi-criteria analysis to provide information about the area most likely to be affected by fire in the Bartin regional forest directorate, Turkey. The mathematics of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the calculation techniques were implemented to develop the forest fire hazard assessment model used in this study. Fire-causing factors such as land cover type/vegetation condition, slope, aspect, altitude, road network and settlement data were used in this application. Forest fire hazard zones were delineated by assigning weights, obtained using AHP technique, to the classes of all the layers according to their sensitivity to fire or their fire-inducing capability. Forest fire hazard categories were classified in three groups as high, moderate and low. Almost 15% of the study area was predicted to be under high-risk zones. When the actual fire occurrence map was compared with the fire hazard zone area derived from the model, the evolved GIS-based forest fire risk model of the study area was found to be in strong agreement with actual fire-affected sites.