Locating suitable areas for forest fire fighting stations in Sardasht, NW Iran

The present study aimed to provide the best locations for forest fire fighting stations in the Sardasht forests located in the northwest of Iran. For this purpose, site selection map for construction of firefighting station was prepared using five factors consist of proximities to river, to road, to former fires, to forest edge and to residential areas. In order to extract the weight of the selected criteria in locating suitable areas, each criterion was compared in a pairwise manner using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the weight of each criterion was obtained using the Expert Choice ver.11 software. Results showed that proximity to road with 24 percent of importance had the highest weight among the selected criteria for locating the forest fire fighting stations. After providing weighted maps of criteria and their integration and applying land use restriction layer map, final site selection map was created. Preliminary results of this study made this point that the proposed zones cover about 29 percent of the study area, with good conditions required for construction of fire station. After excluding the small zones with an area less than 5 ha, one of the most suitable zones was proposed as the best location for construction of fire station. Furthermore, the validation of proposed zone and station location was carried out using a previously developed fire risk map with consideration of 10 km action radius surrounding the station. The selected zone covers about 97.81 percent of susceptible regions from high to very high classes regarding the forest fire hazard