Abstract
Abstract. Wild forest fires are one of the most important disasters that affect the forest ecosystem especially in the regions with arid climate conditions. Besides, forest fires threats human life and results in seriously property loss. In order to fight forest fires effectively, it is crucial that firefighting team should reach fire location and start fire extinguishing activities within the critical response time. Since firefighting teams are transported to fire locations by fire-trucks, the optimum route with minimum travel time should be determined by considering available road network. “New Service Area” tool under “Network Analyst” extension of ArcGIS can be used to determine a region that can be reached from a point within a specified time period. In this study, it was aimed to evaluate the locations of current firefighting teams and investigate locations of potential firefighting teams using “New Service Area” tool. The study area is located in Mustafakemalpaşa in Bursa where forest lands are sensitive to forest fires at the second degree and there is currently one firefighting team in the area. The results indicated that 31.28% of forest land can be reached by current firefighting team within the critical response time. When including new firefighting teams, it was found that accessible forest lands increased to 71.55%. It can be concluded that locating new firefighting teams should be established in the study area to increase the accessible forested areas on time and GIS-based decision support systems can be effectively used to fight forest fires regarding with disaster management.
Highlights
1.1 General InstructionsForest fires caused by natural processes and human factors are seen as one of the most important factors affecting forest ecosystems (Akay et al, 2011)
In order to fight with forest fire effectively, a “New Service Area” method under “Network Analyst” extension of ArcGIS was applied in the study (Figure 2), considering that the firefighting teams must reach the fire area during critical response time
“New Service Area” method was applied considering the critical response times of 30 minutes because the forested areas in the region was sensitive to forest fires at the second degree
Summary
Forest fires caused by natural processes and human factors are seen as one of the most important factors affecting forest ecosystems (Akay et al, 2011). 1250 forest fires occur annually and approximately 21.000 ha of forest lands are damaged (GDF, 2013). It is important for the firefighting teams to be deployed in the right locations in order to reach the fires as soon as possible by using the shortest and safest route (Akay et al, 2011; Akay and Sakar, 2009; Varol et al, 2010). In the areas sensitive to the fire, firefighting team must arrive to the scene in critical response time when the probability of controlling forest fires rises significantly (Keramitsoglou et al, 2004). The critical response time are computed based on fire sensitivity level of the forested areas (Table 1). As the number of fires and amount of burned areas increase fire sensitivity level increases from first degree to fifth degree (Kucuk and Unal, 2005)
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