The synergistic use of AHP and GIS to assess factors driving forest fire potential in a peat swamp forest in Thailand

Abstract Wildfires are a main reason of environmental changes in natural ecosystems. While prevention and suppression of forest fires are crucial components of a forest management plan, it is of paramount importance to support decisions with accurate and tangible information. Geospatial data have been a useful source in this aspect, and various techniques have been proposed to define the zonation of forest fire risk in fire-prone areas. In this study, we classify and map forest fire risk in a peat swamp forest in Khreng sub-district, Thailand. Geospatial, climatic, and topographic data (namely elevation, slope, rainfall, land use/land cover, normalized difference vegetation index, and proximity to rivers, settlements, and roads) are fed into the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Geographical Information System (GIS) methods to map the area into five fire risk categories. The results are validated based on 70 historic fire events. About 88.57% of the ground truth fire incidents occurred at locations characterized by our assessment as very high risk class and 11.43% in the high risk class. It is suggested that the synergy of geospatial data and GIS and AHP techniques yields useful and accurate fire zone maps, which may aid addressing future fire prevention measures and forest management of fire-prone areas.