Identifying spatial clustering phenomena in forest-fire sequences

Spatial clustering in fire data recorded from 1997 to 2003 in an area of central Italy has been deeply investigated using indices of different type: (i) a topological index , the Voronoı¨ polygon area; (ii) a statistical index, the Morishita index; (iii) a dimensional index, the fractal dimension. Our findings reveal the presence of clustering in the spatial distribution of the fire set analysed. The knowledge of such property can be very useful to estimate overdensity of fires in those areas, where particular prevention and allocation of resources should be assessed.