Modelling of Environment Vulnerability to Forests Fires and Assessment by GIS Application on the Forests of Djelfa (Algeria)

Abstract

Risk management of forest fires starts from its assessment. This assessment has been subject of several research works and many models of fire risk have been developed. One of them has been developed by ourselves, for the Mediterranean areas. However environmental vulnerability to forest fires is an important part of risk; it represents, in fact, the exposed challenge to this scourge and therefore it worths particular attention by decision makers. Thus and due to the importance of socio-economic potential of forest and the negative influence of fire on this one, we propose in this work, a model for vulnerability assessment to forest fires based on the principle of the weighted sum. Application of the proposed model suggested to use of geomatics technologies to the spatialize level of vulnerability. Within this framework, a GIS was developed and applied to the forests of Djelfa in the Saharian Atlas, as originality, it will allow the understanding of the concept of vulnerability and risk associated the steppes area scale to reach a good space control.