Territorial Resilience Through Visibility Analysis for Immediate Detection of Wildfires Integrating Fire Susceptibility, Geographical Features, and Optimization Methods

Abstract

Climate change effects tend to reinforce the frequency and severity of wildfires worldwide, and early detection of wildfire events is considered of crucial importance. The primary aim of this study was the spatial optimization of fire resources (that is, watchtowers) considering the interplay of geographical features (that is, simulated burn probability to delimit fire vulnerability; topography effects; and accessibility to candidate watchtower locations) and geo-optimization techniques (exact programming methods) to find both an effective and financially feasible solution in terms of visibility coverage in Chalkidiki Prefecture of northern Greece. The integration of all geographical features through the Analytical Hierarchy Process indicated the most appropriate territory for the installment of watchtowers. Terrain analysis guaranteed the independence and proximity of location options (applying spatial systematic sampling to avoid first order redundancy) across the ridges. The conjunction of the above processes yielded 654 candidate watchtower positions in 151,890 ha of forests. The algorithm was designed to maximize the joint visible area and simultaneously minimize the number of candidate locations and overlapping effects (avoiding second order redundancy). The results indicate four differentiated location options in the study area: (1) 75 locations can cover 90% of the forests (maximum visible area); (2) 47 locations can cover 85% of the forests; (3) 31 locations can cover 80.2% of the forests; and (4) 16 locations can cover 70.6% of the forests. The last option is an efficient solution because it covers about 71% of the forests with just half the number of watchtowers that would be required for the third option with only about 10% additional forest coverage. However, the final choice of any location scheme is subject to agency priorities and their respective financial flexibility. © 2022, The Author(s).