METHODOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT FOR FOREST FIRE HAZARD MAPPING IN NEPAL

Abstract

In NNepal, annually due to uncontrolled forest fi res, lots of valuable forests and biotic and abiotic resources are being destroyed. There is no effective and actionable forest fi re hazard zoning map available in Nepal so far. The objectives of this research is to develop a methodology (equation) using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and incorporating the selected major parameters (chosen from a review of the literature) for forest fi re hazard mapping in Nepal. The various parameters have roles in the forest fi re; among them due to thorough literature reviews it was found that the most important parameters for the forest fi re are land use/land cover types (forest types), proximity to roads (human interference), aspect, slope and elevation. These selected five parameters were obtained and reclassified in the scale of low to very high according to their potentiality for forest fi re hazard. After that the use of well-known decision making process named, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used and the pairwise comparison between these five parameters was done along with the assignation of values from 1 to 9 from the fundamental scale of AHP. The use of AHP provided the possible weightage for each of the five parameters and one equation for fire hazard mapping was developed using those coefficients. The equation so developed was used to make the forest fi re hazard map for Nepal. The reliability of the model so developed was checked with the Active forest fi re data obtained from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from the date November 2000 to December 2013. Secondly the historical data series from an online portal for disaster information, named "DesInventar" have been used. The comparison of the fi re hazard model equation so developed in the study showed correlation with the historical data of fi re events from above mentioned two sources. The use of AHP and Geographic Information System (GIS) in this study clearly illustrates that these two tools can be used for the forest fi re hazard mapping, and decision making process for forest fire hazard mapping in large scale with accuracy.