Determining of effective criteria in locating firefighting station in forest

This study aimed to extract effective spatial criteria in construction of forest fire fighting stations. In this study for extraction and prioritization of effective criteria, Delphi and AHP methods were used. To determine effective criteria, the opinions of experts and specialists in a Delphi approach were asked to clarify the influencing factors to allocation of land to forest fire fighting stations. In the first stage after sending and collecting questionnaires, mentioned criteria by experts were examined and using expert perspective the criteria that have less importance was omitted. Finally the following criteria were selected: Proximity to residential areas, Proximity to river, Proximity to post fires, Proximity to road, and Proximity to forest edge. Then with using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), weight or relative importance of each selected factors were obtained. Based on results the highest important factor was the proximity to road with 0.25 weight among other factors. Then Proximity to river (0.23), Proximity to post fires (0.22), Proximity to forest edge (0.19) and Proximity to residential areas, were next in rank, respectively. Also pairwise comparisons of sub-criteria for each factor showed that areas close to roads, river and areas with a history of prior fires in forest regions and also areas close to residential areas have highest importance in allocating land to the forest fire fighting station.