Objective Sanming area of Fujian Province, eastern China is a forest fire-prone area. This study aims to reduce losses caused by fires and cutting off fire sources through the overall layout of biological fuelbreaks in the research area of Jiangle County, Sanming City of Fujian Province.
Method In order to comprehensively plan the biological fuelbreaks in Jiangle County, we obtained the minimum control area by analyzing the spatial and temporal distribution of forest fires in Jiangle County over the past 12 years, determined the location of biological fuelbreaks through spatial analysis, hydrological analysis, and object-oriented spatial feature extraction and other methods and finally calculated the fire belt network density after selecting optimal fire-resistant tree species and determining the biological fuelbreak width based on statistics of the current status of biological fuelbreaks in Jiangle County.
Result The density of biological fuelbreaks was finally determined to be 19.04 m/ha and the minimum control area was finally determined to be 10 ha. The final biological fuelbreaks need to be built were 3 591.67 km, including 1 846. 64 km in ridges, 384.21 km in valleys and 1 360.83 km in forest edges. The width of biological fuelbreaks of ridges was 12 m, and valleys and forest edges were both an average value, i.e. 9 m. Thus, the total area of the planned biological fuelbreaks was 3 786.49 ha. Choosing Schima superba as the major species, and Camellia oleifera and Phyllostachys heterocycla as subsidiary species after comparing the fire-resistant ability of main tree species in Jiangle County not only achieved a better result of fire prevention but also had economic benefits.
Conclusion Based on the previous studies on fuelbreak construction in Fujian Province, and taking its density, minimum control area, construction location, and appropriate width into consideration, as well as the choose of fire-resistant tree species, this study has managed to optimize the spatial layout of fuelbreaks in Jangle County. This economical and pragmatical engineering, which is adaptative to local conditions will play an important role in fire prevention in Jiangle County of Fujian Province, eastern China.
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