The Dynamics of Forest Fire Hazard Changes in the Udmurt Republic
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The main approaches to the organization of monitoring of fire hazardous situations at the regional level and the problems arising in the technical support of such monitoring have been investigated. The aim of this work has been to study the dynamics of changes in fire hazard in forests on the territory of the Udmurt Republic. The variation in the comprehensive fire hazard indicator, observed regardless of the structure of survey plots, has been considered along with data on actual fires in 2011–2023. Due to the significant extent of the territory of Udmurtia, it has been assumed that the comprehensive indicator differs with a change in longitude or latitude, calculated for the maximum number of observation points simultaneously. An application has been developed that collects and displays data and calculates a comprehensive fire hazard indicator for 210 localities over 94 days of the summer period of 2023. The application allows one to evaluate both static data on fires in the past in the form of a “bubble” visualization, and fluctuations in the comprehensive indicator during the fire season. OpenWeather has been used as a weather service, and OpenLayers – as a map data library. The distinctive features of the created application have been: a) displaying the wind direction and fire hazard class at observation points using color markers; b) using a raster map of the region to determine the potential connection between the current fire hazard class and the nature of the forest fund plots. As the study has shown, within each of the 25 municipalities of the region, the actual comprehensive indicator can vary significantly. The results of multi-day monitoring have made it possible to establish a strong correlation (0.88) between the indicator and longitude for populated areas of the Udmurt Republic, and a weak correlation (0.31) between the indicator and latitude. It has been shown that the majority of fires in April–October occur in May – 33.8 % of the total number of cases that have occurred during the period of 2011–2023. The results of the study can be useful for the development and implementation of measures to prevent forest fires and reduce damage from them, as well as for clarifying or validating potential fire zones based on modern approaches.
Author: Alexander P. Tyurin
Language: English
Topic: Fire effects on ecosystems
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Climate action
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409445204