Predictive modeling of forest fire using geospatial tools and strategic allocation of resources: eForestFire
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Predictive modeling of forest fire using geospatial tools and strategic allocation of resources: eForestFire Abdul Qayum1
•
Firoz Ahmad2 • Rakesh Arya3 • Rajesh Kumar Singh4
Accepted: 31 August 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Fire is among major threats to the world’s forests, leading to tremendous biodiversity losses. Forest fire in India has greatly increased in the last few decades; the state of Arunachal Pradesh, a recognized Himalayan biodiversity hotspot, is extremely prone to this disaster. The objective of this study was to develop GIS integrated mapping of direct and indirect factors, leading to a predictive model to identify settlements/villages for the strategic allocation of resources towards damage mitigation and control. Initial hotspots were generated by integrating factors of socio-economy, geography and climate, using differential weightage. The intersection of these with fire data, led to identification of final hotspots within the predictive model. The model was improved by linking it to a mobile App and the WebGIS portal. Of the 5258 settlements/villages, a total of 560 were found to be at high fire risk. Percentage correlation increased from 63 to 74, after data revision through the App. A focused intervention on predicted villages was undertaken, resulting in a decrease of 31% of fire incidence in comparison of last five years (2015–20) data. Such advanced information about fire disaster with optimal use of limited resources was greatly helpful, and helped protect the rich Himalayan biodiversity. Keywords Forest fire Biodiversity GIS mapping eForestFire e-governance Predictive model Arunachal pradesh
1 Introduction There have been increased global forest fire linked threats in the recent past (Pandey 2018), which have the potential to bring systematic changes in the functions of many ecosystems (Bond and Keeley 2005; Donald et al. 2004). The Australian fire (Shukman 2020) and Amazon fire (Yadvinder et al. 2009) were largely climate linked disasters, but also occurred in part due to improper local forest management practices, leading to the tremendous loss of biodiversity. Climatic conditions are important in & Abdul Qayum [email protected] 1
Department of Forest and Wildlife, UT Administration, Chandigarh, India
2
Vindhyan Ecology and Natural History Foundation, Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, India
3
Center for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences JNU, New Delhi, India
4
Department of Environment and Forests, Govt of Arunachal Pradesh, Itanagar, India
determining vegetation distribution and the local ecology of forests (Kirschbaum et al. 1996). Climate interacts significantly with vegetation (Sharma and Rikhari 1997), and its severity plays a crucial role in forest fires (Harrison et al. 2010). The temperature during the summer enhances evapo-transpiration and makes the forest floors very dry (Vicente-Serrano et al. 2010). Factors such as a prolonged summer, absence of precipitation for long
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