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Forest Fire Risk Modeling (Fire Hazard Zonation):

With the aid of Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Govt. of India, to analyze the effect of forest fires in Telangana and to prepare a fire management plan, the fire hazard zonation using Geomatics by taking various factors that are influencing the fire into consideration viz., the fuel (forest type and density), the topography (slope and aspect), the proximity (roads and villages), the environmental factors (wind, temperature, rainfall etc), for 15 districts are completed. These maps are useful in delineating most to least vulnerable areas to fire and helpful in creating fire lines and combating the fire hazard. Hence these maps are helpful for development of forests and wildlife. The Fire Risk Model generated are compared with the satellite imagery and found matching to a great extent.

The various thematic layers like vegetation, slope, aspect, road and village are integrated for modeling the fire risk zones. Integration of these layers is done in a hierarchical scheme. Different layers have different degree of influence on fire. According to field observation, previous occurrences, vegetation characteristics and the complexity of the terrain the variables are weighted. Weightages are given to each variable as per their influence. The weight factor contributes to the degree of influence in the modeling. The layers are spatially modeled using overlay analysis to generate the fire risk model and the outputs are generalized and rescaled to suit the requirement.