GIS-analysis of ground transport accessibility of fire stations at regional scale

Abstract

Geospatial approaches are widely used to organize access and to manage the extinguishing of forest fires globally. Term "transport accessibility" is used in a variety of geographical and economic researches. Assessment of transport accessibility is directly related to the feasibility study to locate the fire stations in a particular region. Location analysis of objects relative to other objects, while taking into account various quantitative and qualitative parameters, is a classical problem solved by geoinformation systems.Present research work is aimed to be used to improve the situation with forest fires in Russia where one of the main asset of operational regional firefighting in the forests is a fire-and-chemical (fire) station. Traditionally station placement is under the responsibility of Russian region to which stations are administratively subordinate. The location of fire station is determined taking into account the species structure of forests, natural fire danger, road infrastructure and some other factors. Irkutsk region, one of the territories with the constant perennial fire danger in the forests, was chosen as a test area.

Forest Fire Risk Assessment and Proposal for Fire Stations in different Geographical Regions of Central Nepal

“…(2017) also have used the same tool for fire station coverage in Brunei Muara district of Brunei Darussalam, as in this study where additional data on population and existing fire stations was used. Podolskaia et al (2019) have also considered similar approach but the difference lies in the fact that they already have fire stations in Irkutsk region of Russia which they want to expand whereas it's a completely novel step for Nepal. Thus, it creates an opportunity for further study in this fire station field.…”

“…Those fire stations couldn't cover forest fire risk zones entirely. Meanwhile, Said et al (2017) and Podolskaia et al (2019) have proposed additional forest fire stations to existing one in order to provide broader coverage to the fire risk zone. This was possible because of developed road facilities in those study areas whereas the scenario is not the same in case of this study, as the road access is mandatory for any fire stations to function properly, however, this is lagging behind in case of Nepal.…”

A Methodology for Generating Service Areas That Accounts for Linear Barriers

“…TIN data are interpolated to produce service area polygons in the adopted cost intervals. Such analyses have been presented in the literature [21] in research studies addressing transportation [22], economic [23], social [13,24], security [25] and other problems [26]. The results of an exemplary analysis with a cartographic presentation of a service area are shown in Figure 2.…”

Analysis of infrastructural forest data with GIS-tools

“…Forest roads standards play an important role in the forest management, there is an example for the accessing of forest fires in Turkey (Akay et al, 2021) in our collaborative projects. From the methodological point of view we have moved from the accessibility analysis of forest fires (Podolskaia et al, 2019;Podolskaia et al, 2020b) to the analysis of forest resources' spatial location (Podolskaia et al, 2020c). By analyzing actual forest resources' accessibility, which takes into account types and conditions of roads, time and traffic speed, length of ground routes, as well as location of fire stations and settlements we propose some forest management solutions or scenarios at the regional scale of Russia.…”