Wildfire Risk Assessment and Spatial Zoning in Forests and Rangelands using GIS-Based Multi-criteria Decision-Making Techniques in Central Zagros

The increasing frequency and intensity of fire in forests and rangelands is a very worrying issue. Forest and rangeland fire is a common natural or human disaster that has a great impact on the vegetation structure, ecosystem carbon storage, fauna and flora, forest landscape, and invasion of introduced plant species. Accurate assessment of forests and rangelands fire risk and its zoning can be of great practical importance in preventing fire and reducing its damages in line with efficient environmental management. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the risk of forests and rangelands fire and its zoning by integration of Group Analysis Hierarchical Process (G-AHP) and Frequency Ratio (FR) method within Geographic Information System.
 This research was carried out in a part of the middle Zagros located in Oramanat region (Kermanshah province), due to numerous fires in recent years and in order to accurately identify and prioritize factors affecting fire and prepare a fire risk map. The criteria influencing the occurrence of forest and rangeland fires were identified based on the opinion of experts and literature review. In total, 4 criteria and 12 sub-criteria including infrastructure (Distance to roads, Distance to settlements), ecological (Average annual precipitation, Average monthly temperature, Forest cover density, Range cover density), socio-economic (Land use/land cover, Population density) and physiographic (Slope, Aspect, Elevation, Distance to Rivers) criteria were evaluated and weighted using G-AHP and pairwise comparison by 13 researchers (experts) related to forest and rangeland fires. The relative importance of different classes of sub-criteria maps was also calculated using the FR method. Finally, the fire risk zoning map was obtained using Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) method in the GIS environment in five risk classes (Very Low to Very High). The validation of the results was performed by overlaying the zoning map with the fires that happened in the study area in 2016-2024.
 The results showed that the socio-economic criteria with a weight of 0.473 and the sub-criteria of land use/land cover with a weight of 0.252 were assigned the highest importance and were recognized as the most important criteria and sub-criteria effective on the occurrence of fire in forest ecosystems. The fire risk zoning map showed that about 52 percent of the study area is in the High and Very High risk class. Additionally, based on the results, by overlaying the real fire map and the fire risk zoning map, 94.41 percent of the fire patches area are located in areas with high fire risk, which can indicate the accurate assessment and high accuracy of the zoning map.
 In general, this study highlighted the mapping importance of burned areas and fire risk zoning and provided a new framework for identifying and prioritizing different factors affecting fire in the fire-sensitive forest areas of Oramanat (Kermanshah province) that can be effective in line with prioritized prevention and control operation to prevent forest and renageland degradation in the future.