Design and evaluation of helicopter landing variants for firefighting in Golestan National Park, Northeast of Iran

Helicopter landing sites in proximity to the forest fire-risk zones are necessary for the delivery of supplies and fire emergency response teams. In this paper, we initially prepared forest fire risk map using Random Forest algorithm by overlaying the effective factors on fire occurring including vegetation types, physiographic, climatic and human factors. Then, three variants of natural candidate sites for helicopter landing were designed by analysis of terrain slope, site areas, canopy gap, and fire risk zone. The value of each variant was evaluated using proximity analysis. In this analysis, proximity to river, area covered by landing and time cost of response teams from landing to fire zone was estimated. The optimum variant was selected by Analytical Hierarchy Process. Based on results, it strongly recommends the use of the variant one whenever possible, since the time cost and proximity to the river were lower and the area covered was higher than other variants.