Forest Fire Risk Assessment in Balikesir using Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP and Pythagorean Fuzzy TOPSIS

Forest fires can occur for a variety of reasons and spread rapidly. Therefore, this is a major environmental problem. In Turkey, especially in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions, 12 million hectares are at risk of forest fires. Risk areas in forest fires are places where fires can easily start and spread rapidly to other areas. Nature is difficult to control. In this context, this study addresses the problem of identifying areas with high fire risk in Turkey. Especially Balıkesir province is a touristic place, has a large forest area, high plant diversity and is an agricultural region. For this reason, 20 districts of Balıkesir were identified as alternatives. These are Bandirma, Edremit, Dursunbey, Susurluk, Manyas, Burhaniye, Ayvalik, Havran, Gönen, Kepsut, Erdek, Marmara Island, Altieylül, Karesi, İvrindi, Savastepe, Bigadic, Sindirgi, Gömec, Balya. Due to the high probability of fire in these districts, proposing a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is very valuable to obtain convincing results. For this reason, Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets (PFS) have been used in many applications in the literature, which offer a broad evaluation scale to the decision maker, and the combination of AHP-TOPSIS has been applied. In addition, PFS has been used for the first time in order to model uncertainties more effectively in risk assessment and management of forest fires. The weights of the criteria causing forest fires were calculated by Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP method. From this method, air temperature ranks first with a ratio of 0.153. The second rank is humidity. Therefore, low humidity and air temperature significantly affect the frequency and severity of forest fires by reducing the water content of vegetation, increasing the ignition potential and favoring the rate of fire spread. Using these weights, the Pythagorean Fuzzy TOPSIS method was used to rank the districts at risk of forest fires. Edremit is ranked first. The Edremit district is the most sensitive region due to high temperatures and low humidity in summer. In addition, 32 different endemic plant species in the Kaz Mountains increase the area's ecological importance. Therefore, it is of great importance to develop effective strategies to prevent forest fires in the Edremit district. Sensitivity analysis was applied to test the significance of the result.