Impact of environmental and human factors on rural fire occurrence.

Understanding the influence of environmental factors and human activities on fire occurrence in rural areas is of considerable interest in order to facilitate effective prevention strategies. The newly named Natural Area of Sierra Nevada (both a National and Natural Park) is one of the larger areas of environmental and tourism interest in Spain and includes, among other areas, much of Granada Alpujarra and Almeria Alpujarra and the outskirts of the principal ski resort. These areas receive each year thousands of visitors of different kinds (sports, cultural, etc.) which, together with other factors, clearly influence the impact and the possibility of fire occurrence. This paper presents a selection of the factors which have the greatest influence on the probability of a fire occurrence and uses a multivariate statistical technique that considers as influential variables several selected factors of environmental type, factors of human type, factors of land holdings type, etc.