Lama Ehssan * ⁽¹⁾

(1). Ecology and Forestry department, Faculty of Agriculture Engineering, Latakia university, Latakia, Syria.

 (*Corresponding author: lama ehssan. E-Mail: ehssan.lama@gmail.com)

Received: 11/06/2024         Accepted:9/02/2025

Abstract: 

Forest fires play a critical role in landscape degradation and cause significant damage to public property. As fire occurrences have increased over the last several decades, forest fire behavior modeling has become the key to predict the rate of fire spread, exploring fire spread, plan firefighting, reduce fire spread and extinguishing them before they reach a critical size. This study aimed to simulate AL SIRAJ fire which occurred during 2017 in Latakia Governorate by comparison the differences between real and simulated fire using FFSM-GIS model, which depends on the factors affecting forest fires behavior in study area as inputs: Wind Speed (WS) , Wind Direction (WD) Combustibility Index (CI), Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD), the Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), Slope (S), and Aspect (AS). The simulated area was determined depending on the outputs of the model (Fire Spread Index FSI and Fire Spread Time (FST). Results show that, the performance of simulation was acceptable by the similarity of spread behavior between the real and simulated fires . However, the burned area predicted by the model was overestimated

Keywords: Forest fires, FFSM-GIS model, Latakia Governorate, Forest simulation, Geographic information system.

Full Paper in Arabic: pdf