Forest fire risk mapping using multi criteria decision analysis method: The case of Karabük

Forest fires are the most important natural disasters in our country that cause huge forest losses every year as it is all over the world. Good fire risk management needs to be established in order to make more effective and efficient decisions in fighting against forest fires and protecting forests from fire. Forest fire susceptibility maps are needed for good fire risk management. In the production of forest fire susceptibility map, both literature review and field studies are indicated that the following parameters; height, slope, view, distance to road lines, settlement distance, ground surface temperature and stand type parameters determined to be effective. In addition, the forest fire inventory map, which is required for these layer maps to determine their relation to the wild forest fires; Karabük Forest Management Directorate has been created specifically for this study by determining the spatial distributions of 123 forest fires originating from the beginning of 2012-2016 based on the starting points. With the Analytical Hierarchy Method, the weights of each factor were determined for the forest fires, the weights were analyzed and forest fire sensitivity maps were produced. Produced forest fire susceptibility map were categorized under 4 categories as; low, medium, high and very high fire susceptibility. In order to see how well the generated forest fire susceptibility map matches the reality, the obtained forest fire susceptibility maps and the forest fire inventory map are compared and an overlap of 92% was found according to the Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method.