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Forest Fire Management Using Geospatial Information System
F. Hoseinali and M.A. Rajabi
Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Tel: +98 21 800 8841, Fax: +98 21 800 8837
Email: fhoseinali@geomatics.ut.ac.ir, marajabi@ut.ac.ir
Abstract:
Forest Fire is a natural phenomenon. It is part of the nitrogen cycle and it helps forests to grow healthy. However, "wildfire" is a huge and out of control fire which destroys human wealth and therefore, it is kind of disaster. The very first strategy to defend the forests against wildfire is to avoid it. So fire risk maps are produced and even prescribed burning is done. Nevertheless, wildfire happens and the only choice in this case is to control it. Knowing the fire behavior, one can use forest fire simulation to predict and control the wildfire. There are many factors which play a role in a forest fire. The most important ones are wind velocity and direction, index of forest flammability, slope and aspect of the terrain. Slope is an efficient factor to determine the fire spread direction. Velocity of the wind plays a more serious role in fire spread, if its direction matches with the aspect. A grid-based Digital Terrain Model (DTM) is used to extract slope and aspect of the terrain. Also raster maps showing the index of flammability, velocity and direction of the wind are used. All of these information are put in a Geospatial Information System (GIS) to simulate and visualize the wildfire spread. It is shown that GIS is a very efficient tool to predict and control the wildfire.
Introduction
Nowadays application of Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) in disaster management has extended considerably and in some cases it is even unavoidable. Forest fire happens from time to time and this has given human a chance to observe and develop different models for forest fire behavior. GIS as a powerful tool for management of spatial information, has also proved its potential in forest fire management. There are different applications of GIS in forest fire management out of which the most important ones are hazard map production, forest fire simulation and resource management. Simulation by itself has a main role in the management of forest fire. GIS uses various information layers such as Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and index of flammability along with different models for the pur[ose of forest fire management. Models can be simple or complex. Simple models have few parameters and can be implemented even without GIS, however, because of their simplicity their results are not so reliable. On the other hand, very complex models which use detailed physical characteristics of fire are not reliable either as there is not either enough or up to date information on their parameters. So finding an optimum model that takes advantage of sufficient number of parameters while has an acceptable level of simplicity is very important.
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