Forecasting Approaches
Read this article. Two forecasting approaches are employed for forest fire disaster response planning. Focus on the qualitative flow chart in Figure 2.
Results
Model Outputs: Forest Fire-Prone Area Maps
Both AHP and FR models were performed, and two forest fire probability maps were initially produced. For a proper one-to-one comparison, both probability maps were normalized with probability values ranging from 0 to 1, as shown in Figure 4a,c. These probability maps were then classified into five different forest fire-prone classes: 'very low', 'low', 'moderate', 'high', and 'very high', using the quantile method of classification to produce the final forest fire-prone areas maps, as shown in Figure 4b,d.
The percentage of total land area encompassed by each fire-prone category generated by AHP and FR-based models can be seen in Figure 5. The AHP model depicted large areas for 'moderate' and 'high' prone classes, and together they covered 16,893 km2 (44%) of Bhutan's total land area. The FR model showed the areas of each fire-prone class in a decreasing trend from 'very low' (22,268 km2; 58%) to 'very high' (1535 km2; 4%).
Most of the very high fire-prone areas detected by both the models were situated along the middle belt of the country, corresponding to areas dominated by pure stands of chirpine and blue pine forests, ranging between the 100 to 4962 m a.s.l. and between 0° to 75° slope, and areas close to the southern international border with India.
Figure 3. Spatial layers representing the seven conditioning factors: (a) Land-Use Land Cover (LULC), (b) distance from settlement, (c) distance from road, (d) distance from the southern international border, (e) aspect, (f) elevation, and (g) slope, for modeling forest fire-prone areas in Bhutan. All spatial input layers were classified prior to the analysis using the popular quantile method.
Figure 4. Forest fire probability maps for Bhutan derived from (a) AHP and (c) FR; forest fire-prone area maps for Bhutan derived from (b) AHP and (d) FR.
Figure 5. Graphical comparison of relative difference in percentage of total land area in Bhutan encompassed by each fire-prone category yielded by AHP and FR-based models.