A FUZZY-BASED TOOL FOR SPATIAL REASONING: A CASE STUDY ON ESTIMATING FOREST FIRE RISKY AREAS

The Mediterranean countries like many world countries have forest fire problem. Many forest fires have occurred each year and huge amount of forest areas in each country have been lost. 27 % of Turkey’s lands are covered by forest and 48 % of these forest areas are productive, however 52 % of them must be protected. There occurred 21000 forest fires due to several reasons between 1993 and 2002. It is estimated that 23477 ha area has been destroyed annually due to wildfires. The suitable response to forest fires depends on the evaluation of risks, hazards and values, which form the fire management strategies. In the case of the natural hazard “wildfire”, the quantitative spatial analysis of wildfire risk that allows the generation of individual and collective risk maps. Since classical set theory is used in conventional decision making systems to model uncertain real world, the natural variability in the environmental phenomena can not be modelled appropriately. Because, pervasive imprecision of the real world is unavoidably reduced to artificially precise spatial entities when the conventional crisp logic is used for modelling. In this study fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic algebra were used in mapping the fire risky areas on a regional basis for Turkey. Three membership functions were used in the evaluation of the long term forest fire risk. * Corresponding author. 1