The Analysis of the Forest Fires in Turkey with Statistical Quality Control Method

Abstract

Fire is one of the most serious hazards for forests on earth. Despite each kind of technological development and equipment, fire activity has an increasing trend because of especially climate change and socio-economic reasons. Although fire extinguishing organizations, today, try to suppress this increasing risk with a maximum effort, the big fires in some places cause the enormous areas to get burned.  The fires as big as natural disasters cannot be extinguished most of the time in spite of any efforts or methods when the extreme fire weather conditions come together with inflammable matters and ignition sources. In this study, the number and area of forest fires in Turkey were investigated through statistical quality control method. Despite the decreasing trend of forest fires in terms of area size, the possibility of large fires always exists in the whole Mediterranean Region due to the socio-economic conditions such as increasing human population, migration and any changes that could affect fire activity in climate conditions. As a result of the study, it is seen that there is an overall increase in the number of fires while the burned area decreases. Out-of-control behaviors in control graphs are not in a continuous trend but sometimes exceed the control limits. This condition is seen to be positive as a trend but also points to the possibility of unexpected annual burned area and the number of fires.