Methodological approaches to assessing the effectiveness of regional fire danger scales in forests depending on weather conditions

The problems associated with forest fires are significantly aggravated against the background of climate change. At the same time, the organization of forest protection from fires is one of the most expensive forestry measures, which requires optimizing the costs of forest protection by linking the volume of activities carried out with forest fire risks, in particular, with the indicator of fire danger in forests, depending on weather conditions. At the same time, the methods currently used to determine this indicator do not take into account the natural and climatic characteristics of the country's regions, which led to the need for the specialists of the FBU VNIILM to develop a new classification of fire hazard in forests depending on weather conditions. The accumulation of large volumes of structured data in the field of forest protection from fires, as well as the development of information technologies, make it possible to optimize existing approaches to determining the boundary values of a complex indicator of fire danger in forests according to weather conditions and to perform detailed calculations for all regions of the Russian Federation for the first time. In order to scientifically substantiate the feasibility of implementing the developed classification, a method (including calculation formulas and an algorithm) is proposed, which is based on a comparison of the amount of costs for aerial forest patrolling (calculated according to the regulated number of flights with the corresponding fire hazard class) and the costs of untimely detected fires that have moved into the category of large (only those that could arise on days when flights were not planned according to the current scale, but should be carried out according to the new one). To perform calculations, a special set of software scripts in the PostgreSQL language was developed. On the basis of archival data of the Remote Monitoring Information System of the Federal Forestry Agency (ISDM-Rosleskhoz) and data from regional dispatching services, an assessment of the economic consequences of the transition to a new classification was made. Calculations have shown that despite the fact that the proposed method does not take into account the entire possible effect, it shows the economic feasibility of updating the classification of fire danger in forests depending on weather conditions. The proposed method can be used to prepare a scientific justification for improving the classification of forest fire hazard by weather conditions. In addition, the developed algorithms will be used in the management decision support system in the field of forest fire protection when assessing forest fire risks and planning forest fire events.

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