FOREST FIRE HAZARD MAPPING USING FUZZY AHP AND GIS STUDY AREA: GILAN PROVINCE OF IRAN

Forests are one of the important natural resources that have various ecological, economic, educational and social benefits. This valuable resource has been recently degraded by numerous causes, whether man made or natural. Forest fires can be named as one of these factors, which are putting forests in danger all around the world. Although fires are in some cases beneficial but due to increasing human-caused forest fires, it is crucial to define an efficient system that enables planners to prevent and control the fires. The purpose of this paper is to achieve a fire hazard map, indicating fire prone regions that are prepared by integrating several data such as: Slope, Elevation, Insulation, Vegetation Density, and Distance from Roads etc. The Gilan Province in north of Iran was selected as the study area due to its high density of Forest and frequent fire reports. As far as all these factors are not equally impressing fire ignition and spread, a multi criteria model was used to grade the factors. FAHP (Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process) was the method, used in this research to weight the parameters between 0 to 1. Then, all the weighted layers were overlaid in GIS. To assess the accuracy of forecasted combustion regions, the final hazard map was compared with another layer including areas with high frequency of fire according to 5 years fire history data of studied area. The agreement between these two maps shows the reliability of this method. In accordance with results, proximity to roads and villages are the main factors that influence even topographic parameters and play main role in ignition and consequently forest demolishing.