GIS-Approach to Estimate Ground Transport Accessibility of Forest Resources (Case Study: Novosibirsk Region, Siberian Federal District, Russia)

Abstract

In the big forest countries, there is an actual challenge of accessing the forests for their resources, operational wildfire management, and economic estimations for various purposes. In Russia, there are two ways to access the forests: by air and by ground means. The first way is quite expensive for any country. The second one is less expensive but has the spatial planning challenges to create access routes by existing public roads and forest glades. Regional authorities and firefighting departments are paying attention to the access by ground means, but there is a certain room to improve their management and cooperation methods on a limited budget. These tasks could be solved by GIS-technologies in a more operational manner to automate the routes’ construction especially during the fire season. We used combined geoinformation technology (developed previously) and satellite product, namely vegetation map from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to estimate how accessible any forest area is when moving by public roads and forest glades from a fire station as a starting point. These stations are the main centers to fight the forest fires within the territory of ground protection zones in Russia and we have considered them as the logistic centers to manage the forest resources also. Transport model was created in two variants: no-barriers and barriers-based (forestries). By using these two models we have shown two different scenarios of action. The key area was Novosibirsk Region located in the Siberian Federal District, Russia. We have created a series of maps to show the transport accessibility of forest areas from the fire stations. Estimation of “located” pixels or forest areas accessible from the fire stations for the key area is about 66% - 83%; the most accessible forest type is mixed forests. The number of inaccessible pixels has been increased by more than two times in barriers scenario. Technology can be used for different thematic data sources and domains like ecology or economy.