Conceptual design of a nationwide spatial decision support system for forest fire prevention and fighting

Abstract

Wildfires have become a growing global concern due to the environmental and economic damage they cause. Climate change is a primary cause of wildfires as it increases the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires. In addition to climate change, human activities have become a major cause of wildfires, particularly in the Mediterranean region. Since wildfire is a very complicated environmental problem, effectively responding to and minimising the danger of a wildfire necessitates the integration of all available information into decision-making systems. The complexity of wildfires can have a negative impact on decision-making, particularly when decisions are temporally made under dynamic, uncertain, and contradictory conditions. Since the early 1990s, there has been a rise in the occurrence of “mega-fires” throughout Europe, which are characterised by wildfires that surpass the present firefighting capabilities. Controlling mega-fires exceeds the response capacity of the individual institutions as effective wildfire management requires extensive coordination of the institutions and all available resources at a local, regional, and national level. This cooperation necessitates the integration of advanced technologies with scientific knowledge, as well as the combination of various heterogeneous spatial and non-spatial data. GIS technology provides an efficient, expedited, and economical process of data collection and analysis. In the last decades, GIS-based decision support systems have been used to improve the efficiency of firefighting processes like planning, management, and decision-making. In this study, a conceptual framework of a GIS-based decision support system for wildfire prevention and fighting in Turkey was proposed. The presented conceptual design aims to improve the firefighting capacity by providing decision-oriented spatial information on wildfire risks and dangers timely through integrated functional tools efficiently.