The housing boom and forest fires

This paper provides evidence that the combination of land-use restrictions and an increasing demand for housing can create incentives to induce forest fires as a means to circumvent regulation and increase the supply of land available for residential construction. I estimate the effect of the price of housing on the incidence of forest fires using Spanish data by region for 1991-2005. The results suggest that higher house prices led to a significant increase in the incidence of forest fires in a region. I also find that the increased incidence of forest fires led to a subsequent reduction in forest area and an increase in urban land area. This evidence supports the claims often found in the media that property speculators trying to build in forest land may be behind the recent increases in the incidence of forest fires in Mediterranean countries.Forest fires, housing prices, land-use change

Forest fires: Evaluation of government intervention measures

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relation between government measures, volunteer participation, climate variables and forest fires. A number of studies have related forest fires to causes of ignition, to fire history in one area, to the type of vegetation and weather characteristics or to community institutions, but there is little research on the relation between fire production and government prevention and extinction measures from a policy evaluation perspective. An observational approach is first applied to select forest fires in the north east of Spain. Taking a selection of fires with a certain size, a multiple regression analysis is conducted to find significant relations between policy instruments under the control of the government and the number of hectares burn in each case, controlling at the same time the effect of weather conditions and other context variables. The paper brings evidence on the effects of simultaneity and the relevance of recurring to army soldiers in specific days with extraordinary high simultaneity. The analysis also brings light on the effectiveness of two preventive policies and of helicopters for extinction tasks.Forest fires, policy evaluation

Are Forest Fires Predictable?

Dynamic mean field theory is applied to the problem of forest fires. The starting point is the Monte Carlo simulation in a lattice of million cells. The statistics of the clusters is obtained by means of the Hoshen--Kopelman algorithm. We get the map $p_n\to p_{n+1}$, where $p_n$ is the probability of finding a tree in a cell, and $n$ is the discrete time. We demonstrate that the time evolution of $p$ is chaotic. The arguments are provided by the calculation of the bifurcation diagram and the Lyapunov exponent. The bifurcation diagram reveals several windows of stability, including periodic orbits of length three, five and seven. For smaller lattices, the results of the iteration are in qualitative agreement with the statistics of the forest fires in Canada in years 1970--2000.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figure

High resolution fire hazard index based on satellite images

In December 2015, after 3 year of activity, the FP7 project PREFER (Space-based Information Support for Prevention and REcovery of Forest Fires Emergency in the MediteRranean Area) came to an end. The project was designed to respond to the need to improve the use of satellite images in applications related to the emergency services, in particular, to forest fires. The project aimed at developing, validating and demonstrating information products based on optical and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery for supporting the prevention of forest fires and the recovery/damage assessment of burnt area. The present paper presents an improved version of one of the products developed under the PREFER project, which is the Daily Fire Hazard Index (DFHI)

Seven-dimensional forest fires

We show that in high dimensional Bernoulli percolation, removing from a thin infinite cluster a much thinner infinite cluster leaves an infinite component. This observation has implications for the van den Berg-Brouwer forest fire process, also known as self-destructive percolation, for dimension high enough.Comment: 8 page

Crossover from Isotropic to Directed Percolation

Directed percolation is one of the generic universality classes for dynamic processes. We study the crossover from isotropic to directed percolation by representing the combined problem as a random cluster model, with a parameter $r$ controlling the spontaneous birth of new forest fires. We obtain the exact crossover exponent $y_{DP}=y_T-1$ at $r=1$ using Coulomb gas methods in 2D. Isotropic percolation is stable, as is confirmed by numerical finite-size scaling results. For $D \geq 3$, the stability seems to change. An intuitive argument, however, suggests that directed percolation at $r=0$ is unstable and that the scaling properties of forest fires at intermediate values of $r$ are in the same universality class as isotropic percolation, not only in 2D, but in all dimensions.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, 4 epsf-emedded postscript figure

Strategi Pencegahan Kebakaran Hutan dan Lahan Berdasarkan Persepsi Masyarakat di Desa Dayun Kabupaten Siak

This study aims to determine the strategy for the prevention of forest fires and land based on public perception in the village of Dayun Siak district. The method used in this research is purposive sampling method. Data analysis using analysis of percentage and SWOT analysis. The result showed that the forest fires and land frequently occur are influenced by social conditions like cultural society that opening land by burning which is still often done and majority of people's livelihoods as farmers. Forest fire prevention effort and land that has been done by the people of the village of Dayun which is liaising with the parties or institutions in the prevention of forest fires and land. Based on the SWOT analysis, strategies prevention of the forest fires and land based on public perception is improving the skills of community through community care of fire, improving the facilities and infrastructure of the forest and land fires prevention for communities and strict law enforcement to arsonists forest and land