Meteorological Determinants of Forest Fire Occurrence in the Fall, South Korea

Forest fires have potentials to change the structure and function of forest ecosystems and significantly influence on atmosphere and biogeochemical cycles. Forest fire also affects the quality of public benefits such as carbon sequestration, soil fertility, grazing value, biodiversity, or tourism. The prediction of fire occurrence and its spread is critical to the forest managers for allocating resources and developing the forest fire danger rating system. Most of fires were human-caused fires in Korea, but meteorological factors are also big contributors to fire behaviors and its spread. Thus, meteorological factors as well as social factors were considered in the fire danger rating systems. A total of 298 forest fires occurred during the fall season from 2002 to 2006 in South Korea were considered for developing a logistic model of forest fire occurrence. The results of statistical analysis show that only effective humidity and temperature significantly affected the logistic models (p<0.05). The results of ROC curve analysis showed that the probability of randomly selected fires ranges from 0.739 to 0.876, which represent a relatively high accuracy of the developed model. These findings would be necessary for the policy makers in South Korea for the prevention of forest fires.