An approach for improving firefighting ability of forest road network

ABSTRACT

Forest road network plays a key role in shortening the response time of firefighting activities. Therefore, evaluation and improvement of the ability of firefighting of the forest roads are essential. The widely used travel time criterion evaluation showed that firefighters can reach the areas of fires by walking and carrying portable fire equipment. However, the firefighting capability provided by this method is very limited. It is difficult to ensure that the fires can be controlled. This study proposed a new firefighting distance criterion (FFDC) to evaluate the actual firefighting coverage of the road network. Then, we proposed an approach that aims at mapping the optimal forest road network based on the FFDC. The results showed that the new planned forest road network increases the coverage of the study area from 37.2% to 57.95%. Moreover, to evaluate the influence on the forest environment, we further assessed the newly planned forest road network by using intensity evaluation criteria and absorption evaluation criteria, which are based on a multi-criteria evaluation (MCE). The intensity evaluation was 88.05%, and the absorption evaluation was 68.22%. The forest absorption capacity in the study area was good, and the road network had little impact on the environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Forest fire
• road network planning
• geographic information system
• multi-criteria evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant number 31670554,3170047