Estadísticas de incendios de la cobertura vegetal en el Cantón Santa Ana, provincia de Manabí, Ecuador, en el periodo 2012 –2018

Vegetation fire statistics provide essential information for decision making. The analysis of them allows defining where, when and why fire occurs. The objective of this work was to analyze the vegetation fires statistics in the Canton of Santa Ana, province of Manabi, Ecuador. The statistics corresponded to the period 2012 -January 2018 and were supplied by the Fire Department of Santa Ana. The evaluation of the historical behavior of the vegetation fires occurred was made considering a spatio-temporal context (years, months, days of the week and type of vegetation affected). Thestatistical analyzes were carried out with the SPSS v.22 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), working with a level of significance of 0.05. As a result, it was obtained that in the analyzed period 2016 was the year with the highest percentage ofoccurrences (38.46%) and that between September and January, 87.91% of the total occurrences were registered. No statistically significant difference was found for the occurrences according to the days of the week (p = 0.763) and the hours in which occurrences were reported (p = 0.139) according to the Kruskal-Wallis statistical test. It could be concluded that more than half of the fires occurred in the Ayacucho Parish. It was also found that in the logs missing important information to make the corresponding assessments of historical behavior with the required quality, so that a proposal of the vegetation fire report was prepared.