Forests are a major natural resource and they play an important role in maintaining environmental
balance. The health of a forest in any given area is a true indicator of the ecological conditions prevailing in that
area. One major environmental concern is the occurrence of forest fires (also called wildfires), which affect
forest preservation, create economical and ecological damage and cause human suffering. Fire is the greatest
enemy of standing vegetation and wild animals. Small trees and regeneration are often affected very adversely
(Adab et al. 2001). Even big trees are not spared if the fire is severe. Ground fire destroys the organic matter,
which is needed to maintain an optimum level of humus in the soil (Dong 2006). Fire is one of the dominant
disturbances in the forests of the Golestan province. A precise evaluation of forest fire problems anddecision
on solutions can only be satisfactory when a fire risk zone mapping is available. Forest fire risk zones are
locations where a fire is likely to start, and fromwhere it can easily spread to other areas (Jaiswal et al. 2002).
Several countries like Canada, Australia and U.S.A.have developed highly sophisticated Forest Fire Danger
Rating Systems (FFDRS), while in developing countries these systems are often very difficult to implement,
since they are based on a lot of meteorological data. Many researchers used different models to predict the
forest fire risk, based on a lot of meteorological data and fire frequency data (Lazaros et al. 2002; Amparo and
Oscar 2003; William et al. 2000; Jilang et al. 1995). Most of them mapped forest fire risk zonesby directly using
remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) that contain topography, vegetation, land use,
population, and settlement information (Chuvieco and Congalton 1989; Chuvieco and Salas 1996; Mariel and
Marielle 1996; Jaiswal et al. 2002). A common practice was that forest fire risk zones were delineated by
assigning subjective weights to the classes of all the layers according to their sensitivity to fire or their fire
inducing capability (Dong et al. 2005).