Abstract: |
Human activity is the main factor of forest fires ignitions in Spain, as in all countries of southern Europe. As most of fires are the result of human activity and behavior, their analysis must be based on the signs left in the territory by those who are held responsible. But since this is normally difficult to achieve directly, a good solution could be inferring human sources of ignition from indirect indicators of its number, activity and distribution.The first objective of this work was to identify significant variables than can be used to predict the human ignition risk in Spain. The second one is to propose a human caused fire occurrence prediction model, with a long-term scope. The model is constructed using logistic regression by exploring relationships between the density of human caused fires in the municipality forest area during a period of 13 years (dependent variable) and 26 geographical, socio-economical and environmental variables (independent ones) for 7704 municipalities of the Spanish peninsular territory and Baleares Islands. The model predicts properly the probability of each spatial unit have a high or low incidence of man-caused fires and provides a idea of the relative importance of each human factor in the explaining ignition. |
