Physical Zoning of Forest Fire Risk Using Fuzzy AHP and GIS Methods (Case Study: Asalem)

Forest fires, whether of human or natural origin, are one of the most important challenges in recent years as a crisis. The aim of this study is to prepare a fire potential map using the geographic information system in the forests of rural areas of Asalem city in order to manage these areas for the executive departments. In this paper, zoning of fire hazard was investigated by spatial analysis method and using fuzzy hierarchical process and GIS. Using digital-elevation model, slope, geographical directions, altitude maps were prepared and then type of vegetation, roads, rural settlements and farmlands were mapped. In order to rank and weighting the effective criteria in the occurrence of fire through the method of fuzzy AHP, first 30 questionnaires were distributed among fire experts in the study areas. And they were weighed in the AHP fuzzy. Then the weighted layers were evaluated according to the Raster calculator order in GIS and using fuzzy membership functions. Forest fire risk zone mapping were classified into five classes of areas with very high potential to very low potential. From the total of the study area, the area of very high fire risk is equal to 7170 hectares and the area of very low fire risk is 6908 hectares. The results showed that after the fieldwork, the areas with fire history in previous years were completely matched with the final potential map. 48% of the fires occurred were in areas with high and very high potential.