Abstract

CHAVEZ DURAN, Álvaro Agustín et al. Updating of the system for the estimation of forest fuels (SICCO v3.0). Rev. mex. de cienc. forestales [online]. 2017, vol.8, n.44, pp.155-175. ISSN 2007-1132.

Forests face a wide variety of problems, the main of which is fires. Fires require three basic factors: fuel material, favorable environmental conditions and an ignition factor. The fuel is a particularly important factor because it largely determines the fire hazard. The forest fires program of the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agrícolas y Pecuarias (INIFAP) has developed a tool to estimate the amount of fuel present in a unit of area in a quick, practical and simple way, known as the Forest Fuel Evaluation System (SICCO, Spanish acronym), whose foundational methodology for taking stock of forest fuels is based on planar intersections. The new version of SICCO allows dynamic updates of information regarding the specific gravity, apparent density and mean square diameter using relational databases. It has libraries that extract this information from databases contained within the system itself using the location coordinates of the study areas. Likewise, the users can customize these values according to their specific needs. SICCO makes it possible to estimate forest fuel loads in a simple, transparent way. Thus, the users focus their efforts more on the quality of the collected data than on the use of the equations and processes required for the estimation of the weights per unit of area.

Keywords : Forest fuels; fire; specific gravity; forest fires; system; estimate; update.

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