GIS-based forest fire risk determination for Milas district, Turkey

Forest fires are highly destructive phenomena in both ecological and economic terms. Therefore, it is significant to develop measures to detect and mitigate them. In this study, the forest fire risk map of the Milas district of Turkey was studied using geographical information systems and remote sensing methods. In the first part of the study, the forest fire risk map of the area was developed via a weighted overlay technique with analysis of stand characteristics, topographic features, distance from intermittent streams and built-up environment. According to the resulting forest fire risk map, extremely low-, low-, medium-, high- and extremely high-risk classes covered 0%, 0.5%, 65%, 30% and 0.5% of the forested areas in Milas district of Turkey, respectively. In the second part, the location of a major forest fire, which took place in 2007 in the study area, was determined using the normalized difference vegetation index, the normalized burn ratio, and the burn area index. When compared with the forest fire risk map, it was revealed that 45% of the burned areas in 2007 fell into the high-risk class, while 51% of it was from the extremely high-risk zones. Moreover, the forest risk map was compared with eleven forest fire cases between 2013 and 2019. The results show that eight of these fires took place in high-risk territories. According to these results, it was concluded that the created risk map coincides with the fire incidents.