Evaluating the Fuzzy Weighted Linear Combination Method in Forest Fire Risk Mapping (Case study: Sardasht Forests, West Azerbaijan Province, IRAN)

Yearly hundreds fires occur in forests and rangelands and various regions of Iran. Identification of areas that susceptible to fires the most important step in reducing damages caused by fire and also forest and rangeland resources management and in general natural resources. The study area in this research is part of the Sardasht forests in West Azerbaijan province. In this research with extracting recorded information about occurred fires in Sardasht forests, location of occurring fires were identified and using 10 effective factors in fires in this region (Including: elevation, slope, aspect, land use/land cover, average annual precipitation, monthly average maximum temperature, population, distance from agricultural lands, distance from streams and distance from roads) forest fire risk in GIS using fuzzy weighted linear combination (FWLC) model evaluated and mapping of fire risk in five risk classes (very low to very high) were provided. For fuzzy modeling of value of each factor the fuzzy membership functions and for the weight to criteria Analytical Hierarchy Process are used.Fire risk map result showed that about 60 percent of the study area has a high fire risk. Also, after the integration of risk map with real fire areas, result showed that nearly 92 percent of the burned areas are located in high and very high risk classes.