Factores condicionantes y climáticos en la amenaza de incendio forestal de la microcuenca del Río Chazo Juan, Ecuador

Abstract

This paper evaluates the incidence of conditioning factors (land use and vegetation cover, geomorphology and slope) and climatic factors (temperature, wind speed and relative humidity) on the hazard of forest fires in the Chazo Juan river micro-watershed in Bolivar province, which is part of the Guayas river basin of great importance for Ecuador. It was used, for the conditioning variables, information from the cartographic base scale 1:25,000 of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Aquaculture and Fisheries; for a more detailed description of the climatic variables, it was used information from the yearbooks of nearby meteorological stations of the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology and three meteorological stations that were installed in the study area. The Delphi method was used to weight the variables of the conditioning and climatic factors, which were interpolated and correlated using map algebra in the ArcGis software (10.3) to obtain the Weighted Forest Fire Threat Index and prepare maps with hazard levels for scenarios (maximum, average and minimum values) at a local scale; the correlation of variables was done using the Pearson method. The results show that the conditioning variables have a significant incidence (very high and high); while the climatic variables have little incidence (medium, low, very low and even null in the wind speed in scenarios of maximum and minimum values); there is an inverse relationship between temperature and relative humidity, the higher the temperature the lower the humidity or vice versa, this influences the increase or decrease of the hazard levels.