Abstract:

There is an important fire risk potential for the forest lands distributed in the responsibility area of the Çanakkale Regional Forest Directory (RFD) in terms of the magnitude of the burned areas. Lost and damages of these natural disasters, which have occurred due to the dry summer subtropical Mediterranean climate that dominated over a great part of the Çanakkale RFD and observed climate variations (droughts, heat waves, etc.), have been increasing. In the study, fire climatology is investigated by making use of the hydroclimatological analyses of the long-term climate data and forest fires that were recorded in the Çanakkale RFD. Furthermore, some homogeneity and trend tests were applied to the series of aridity index (AI) and normalised precipitation index (NPI) derived from long-term total precipitation (mm) and potential evapotranspiration (mm) amounts. According to the results of the Kruskal-Wallis homogeneity test applied to the AI and NPI series, means and variances of the sub-periods are statistically random. Results from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCCD) Aridity Index, Erinç’s Aridity Index and Thornthwaite Humidity Index for the stations selected for the Çanakkale RFD are concordant with each other. When the results of climatic classification performed for climatological data of 14 meteorological stations located in the study area, it has been seen that stations are generally belong to arid and semiarid climate classes according to the Erinç’s aridity index, while the climate classes of stations according to the Thornthwaite humidity index are found to vary between the arid, semiarid and semi-humid. Statistically significant correlation coefficients are found to vary from 0.52 to 0.75 between numbers of the forest fires occurred in the Çanakkale RFD and aridity/drought/humidity indices. According to the variations in the AI and NPI series, observed decrease of precipitation amounts in the year of 2008 was corresponded to the most extreme meteorological drought in the series. In the 2008 drought year, approximately the area of 2070 hectares was disturbed by 30 forest fires occurred at the Çanakkale RFD area. Key Words: Forest fire, aridity, drought/humidity indices, climate change, time-series analysis methods, Çanakkale Regional Forest Directory.