Estimation of forest fire risks on the territory of Gomel region with GIS technology

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a decision support system (DSS) for prevention and planning emergency related to forest fires. The work reported in this article was conducted under the project supported by Belarusian State Program for basic research. The application consist on weather data management, a geographical data viewer and visualization of fire risks. The level of forest fire hazard in Republic of Belarus is estimated by scale based on weather conditions. Calculation of the weather based index starts after the descent of snow cover and continues daily until the end of fire season, in autumn. The software uses data on precipitation amount and air humidity to calculate weather based fire hazard index and gives the recommendations for firefighting officials in accordance with regulations. The development of special application – ForestFire GIS – was based on the MapWinGIS – a free and open source geographic information system programming ActiveX Control. The mapping data are the files in vector format, which store all the maps, obtained during application work.