An Overview of Wildfire Prone Forest Surfaces Within the Metropolitan Area of Tirana and Sarajevo

Abstract

This chapter presents a comparative study between the forest surfaces as vulnerable landscape surfaces to wildfire events within the metropolitan areas. The forest fire risk is among the emerging issues in global scale especially triggered by the global warming and climate change, threatening many reserves of natural landscapes. Yet, they are more sensitive in the wildland urban interface (WUI) where the presence of humans in close spatial relation with natural surfaces is the highest. Thus, this study follows the methodical approach previously developed for quantifying the fire ignition probability and wildfire spread capacity of forest surfaces within the metropolitan zone. Basically, the method relies on a multi-criteria approach which integrates a variety of factors (i—anthropogenic, ii—hydro-meteorological, and iii—geophysical) that are considered among the causes of a wildfire either during the ignition or the spread phase of the fire event. The stages of the workflow are applied in QGIS software utilizing open-source geospatial data leading to graphical (maps series) and numerical results. At this stage, this study brings a comparative case between Sarajevo as the capital region in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tirana as the main metropolitan area in Albania. The measurements and the inventory results are jointly analyzed in order to achieve a comparative discussion. The final results show that the metropolitan forest surfaces of Sarajevo are slightly more prone to wildfire ignition events. While the forest surfaces within the metropolitan area of Tirana are much more prone to wildfire spread. Beyond the comparative findings, the identified local hotspots at each case, may serve as guide for policy making by the respective local government and the relevant authorities responsible for disaster risk reduction at metropolitan scale.