Regional Geoinformation Modeling of Ground Access to the Forest Fires in Russia

Abstract

Every year forest fires in Russia, arising on large areas, cause significant damage to the forests, infrastructure and livelihoods of local population. Paper presents an overview of current forest firefighting situation in Russia. Interdisciplinary research combining the specifics of road infrastructure and Russian forest firefighting regulations was conducted to improve ground forest firefighting operations at the regional level and to propose a geoinformation solution. We described a workflow to create the shortest access routes (using Dijkstra algorithm, ArcGIS Desktop Network Analyst) from the fire stations to the forest fires taking into account traveled distance, time and elevation of transport network (public roads and forest glades). Data of access routes created for 2002–2017 forest fire hazardous seasons have been processed and analyzed. Developed service “Access routes” creates the daily-updated cartographic products. Irkutsk region in Siberia, Russia was chosen as a study area.