Zonguldak and Ereğli forest management directorates of forestry fire risk areas determination

Forest fires can occur due to natural and human causes. In both cases, forest fires cause serious damage to natural resources and human life; it causes enormous economic, social and environmental consequences. Although it is not possible to prevent forest fires completely, the awareness of our people and the measures to be taken and forest fires and negative consequences can be minimized. Today, Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques have become very important to prevent and control forest fires. Identify forest fire risk areas; It will be very useful in terms of labor, time and cost in terms of fire intervention. In this thesis, Zonguldak and Ereğli Forest Management Directorates were selected as the test area. Purpose of the study; to determine the role of the most important factors on forest fire in the study area and to create a forest fire risk map of the region. For this purpose, an archive research was carried out in Zonguldak Forest Regional Directorate and Zonguldak and Ereğli Forest Management Directorates. Forest fire register plugs were examined in 2008-2018. With the help of the coordinates located in the fire record plugs, the fire places are marked on the satellite image. The most important factors that cause forest fire in the study area were determined by the opinions of the relevant chiefs, fire log slips and studies in the literature. These factors; land cover type / using, slope, view, height, distance to residential areas and distance to the road lines. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method was used to determine the effect of each factor on forest fire. AHP is one of the multi-criteria decision making methods which is frequently used in literature because it is simple and easy to apply. In order to determine the land cover type, a classification map was created with Landsat 8 satellite image and the classes subject to fire were determined. ASTER DEM satellite image is used for slope, view and elevation maps. Settlement data, including villages, is vectorized via Google Earth. The route data was taken from the stand map provided from the Forest Regional Directorate and the missing data was completed from the Google Earth program. In the GIS environment, buffer and buffer corridors were constructed. Map of each factor affecting forest fire was created in ArcGIS 10.5 program. In this program, the importance of these factors were determined and the maps were re-arranged. Each map was converted to raster data format with 30X30 m resolution and made ready for analysis. As a result, all maps were combined in GIS environment and a forest fire risk map was created for the study area. This map; low, medium and high. It was found that 39% of the total area was in the high risk class which is the most sensitive to fire, 43% was in the middle risk class and 18% was in the low risk class.This research, which will be an important basis for the relevant region in the intervention of forest fires, can be developed for other fire sensitive areas and it is thought to contribute to the forestry of our country. Keywords: Forest Fire, Remote sensing, GIS, AHP, Forest Fire Risk Map