Modelling of forest fire risk spatial distribution in the region of Aures, Algeria

Abstract

The objective of this study is to model and map the forest fire risk in the region of Aures situated in the northeast of Algeria, through the application of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to integrate geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. The methodology is based on a weighted linear combination of three parameters, namely, vegetation, topography and the anthropogenic factor which influences the initiation and propagation of a forest fire. The result is a risk map with four classes according to pixel values, whereas very high-risk class takes up 18.28% of the study area, high-risk class takes up 42.42%, moderate risk class takes up 5.24% and low-risk class takes up 34.05%.

Keywords

• modelling
• forest
• fire
• risk
• Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
• GIS