Background and purpose: Various factors affect the occurrence, spread, and controllability of forest fires. A hazard fire zones map can be obtained by knowing the important influencing factors. This map shows fire severity in different zones and stages which provides a suitable tool for managing, preventing, and reducing the damages caused by fires to the natural resources manager. This study aims to prepare fire hazard severity zones based on the range of these environmental factors in the forest areas of Mamsani and Rostam counties in the northwest of Fars province with an area of 2188.7 square kilometers.

Materials and methods: The environmental criteria that were used in this study include elevation, slope, slope direction, distance from the road, distance from residential areas, distance from agricultural lands, average annual temperature, average annual precipitation, and land use. After collecting data from different sources, the fuzzy concept was applied to standardize the criteria by using different fuzzy membership functions. A hierarchical analysis process (AHP) was used to weight the criteria and prioritize them. For this purpose, a questionnaire was prepared, and criteria were scored by experts. All the weighted criteria were overlayed by weighted linear combination method (WLC). To obtain the weights of the criteria, the data obtained from the questionnaires were extracted and analyzed in the Expert Choice software. Each of the selected criteria was also prepared as a map using the geographic information system (GIS) in the ArcMap software environment. Finally, the fire severity risk map was prepared in five categories of very high, high, medium, low, and very low fire severity zones.

Findings: The results show that the burned areas show a high compliance of the implemented model with the existing situation. Among the studied factors, the three main factors of fire in this area are distance from agricultural land, distance from road and distance from residential areas with relative weights of 0.254, 0.1971 and 0.1786 respectively. The results showed that the most fires occurred in the 1500-1900 elevation class and 0-10% slope class. As the slope increases, the rate of fire has decreased. Also, the southern aspect has been prone to fire.

Conclusions: So, it can be concluded that most fires have occurred in areas where human access to those areas is more and easier and other factors are less important. Also, the results of this research showed that forest fire risk zone mapping can help managers prevent fire in different forest areas.