GIS Procedure to Forecast and Manage Woodland Fires

Abstract

Over the last few years, the phenomenon of woodland fires has become ever more widespread, this is also due to changes in climatic conditions; unfortunately, experience has shown that the consequences for the environment and human life are very serious if the extinguishing operations are not timely. Starting from a brief analysis of the most important available models to simulate fire evolution, the aim of this work was to propose a dynamic prototypal GIS to support the forecast of woodland fire spread and the management of the available resources for extinguishing operations. Currently GIS technology offers many tools for the implementation of analytical models that are useful to evaluate the temporal and spatial evolution of natural phenomena. Specific functionalities for network and lifeline management are also available that make it possible to create a decisional support system (DSS) to obtain the real-time optimization of resource allocation.

In this chapter we introduce a model-based approach developed in the GIS environment, in which a well-known fire spread model has been implemented and a specific analysis of the road network has been carried out to supply real-time information about the optimal route to reach fires. The proposed methodology has been applied to two different case studies: to the territory of Mount Etna (Province of Catania), and to the Province of Enna, both in Sicily. The result is a DSS GIS environment by which it is possible to evaluate and to display real-time maps about: (1) the velocity and the preferential direction of a simulated fire; (2) the best route to reach the front of the woodland fire.