Forest fires and basic degree danger in the forest enterprise Macurije, Cuba

Abstract

The research was conducted in the Forest Enterprise (FE) Macurije, located in the Pinar del Río province, Cuba.The objective was to contribute to the improvement of fire management activities considering a fire history evaluation and the definition of local risk of wildfires in the enterprise. The information on forest fires and forest dynamics correspond to the period 2007 to 2011. The historic performance evaluation considered the distribution temporal (years, months, hours, days of the week) and spatial (groups of species, forest cover type) of the fires. To define the basic degree of danger the study area was divided into grids (cells) of 25 km². For each cell with forest vegetation, frequency, causality and flammability indices were calculated. Integrating these three indexes was obtained basic degree of danger of forest fire. Among the main results obtained may be mentioned that the 74.84%
of the fires occurred between March and June, 68.39% between 14:00 and 17:00, and 88.39% in forests of Pinus sp. and 3.50% of the area (2723.39 ha)  presented a basic high wildfire hazard.