Forest fires are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, creating serious ecological and economic losses. It is, therefore, necessary to understand the distribution and forest fire susceptibility for monitoring and controlling forest fires. This study examines forest fire susceptibility using spatial mapping in the Barandabhar Corridor which lies in Chitwan District, Nepal. The study adopted the geospatial approach with the Analytic Hierarchy Process, using seven factors, namely elevation, wind speed, rainfall, land surface temperature, normalized difference vegetation index, normalized difference moisture index, and land use land cover. A normalized comparison matrix was then created for the determination of weightage with a consistency ratio within the acceptable range of 0.033 (< 0.1). The susceptibility map was categorized into five susceptibility classes and were highly correlated with actual fire events, with AUC value of 0.70. About one-third of forests area (37.5%) is under high fire susceptibility, followed by a very high susceptibility zone (34.3%), indicating a high fire risk. The findings shows that fire risk is not uniformly distributed and highlights the importance of spatially targeted fire management, fuel reduction, firebreak establishment, and early warning systems. The generated map can serve as a practical decision tool for community based forest management and climate adaptation planning in Nepal.
Ojha et al. (Sat,) studied this question.