Geospatial Modeling of Containment Probability for Escaped Wildfires in a Mediterranean Region

Abstract

Despite escalating expenditures in firefighting, extreme fire events continue to pose a major threat to ecosystem services and human communities in Mediterranean areas. Developing a safe and effective fire response is paramount to efficiently restrict fire spread, reduce negative effects to natural values, prevent residential housing losses, and avoid causalties. Though current fire policies in most countries demand full suppression, few studies have attempted to identify the strategic locations where firefighting efforts would likely contain catastrophic fire events. The success in containing those fires that escape initial attack is determined by diverse structural factors such as ground accessibility, airborne support, barriers to surface fire spread, and vegetation impedance. In this study, we predicted the success in fire containment across Catalonia (northeastern Spain) using a model generated with random forest from detailed geospatial data and a set of 73 fire perimeters for the period 2008-2016. The model attained a high predictive performance (AUC = 0.88), and the results were provided at fine resolution (25 m) for the entire study area (32,108 km 2). The highest success rates were found in agricultural plains along the nonburnable barriers such as major road corridors and largest rivers. Low levels of containment likelihood were predicted for dense forest lands and steep-relief mountainous areas. The results can assist in suppression resource pre-positioning and extended attack decision making, but also in strategic fuels management oriented at creating defensive locations and fragmenting the landscape in operational firefighting areas. Our modeling workflow and methods may serve as a baseline to generate locally adapted models in fire-prone areas elsewhere.

A Geospatial Framework to Assess Fireline Effectiveness for Large Wildfires in the Western USA

“…Better monitoring and data archiving of wildfire conditions and suppression operations are critical to advance in this direction. So too is aligning design of performance evaluation systems with advances in fire analytics that support operationally relevant planning [5,24,25,27,28,56,57].…”

“…When opportunities do not exist to safely engage in direct containment tactics, resources are often allocated to indirect tactics such as prepping containment lines far from the current wildfire perimeter. Indirect containment tactics may, in some circumstances, enhance safety, and enable locating fireline where conditions increase control probability such as roads, non-timber fuel types, and mellow slopes [23][24][25][26][27][28]. However, fireline located too far from the current wildfire perimeter will not directly contribute to fire containment if it does not engage with the fire.…”

Burning Susceptibility Modeling to Reduce Wildfire Impacts: A GIS and Multivariate Statistics Approach

“…Several tools are used to prevent the occurrence and mitigate the negative impacts of the fires, such as the forest burning susceptibility maps, often generated from historical data of fire occurrence (Ferreira et al, 2015;Guglietta et al, 2015;Parente & Pereira, 2016;Rodrigues et al, 2020). These maps can be generated from different methodologies (Pan et al, 2016;Akinola & Adegoke, 2019;Mota et al, 2019;Abedi Gheshlaghi et al, 2020;Tonini et al, 2020), such as statistical methods (Bui et al, 2016;Gholamnia et al, 2020) and hierarchical methods (Eugenio et al, 2016).…”

Prototyping a Geospatial Atlas for Wildfire Planning and Management

“…In recent years, the fire science community has developed a wide range of operationally focused assessment and planning tools. This body of work includes various risk assessment tools to estimate the social and ecological consequences of fire [29][30][31][32][33]; models of suppression difficulty, resistance to control, and potential fire control locations that speak to firefighting challenges and opportunities [34][35][36][37][38]; and models of fire responder safety zones, escape routes, and falling tree (snag) hazards to help suppression resources avoid harm [39][40][41][42]. Despite the proliferation of risk-based information, its use in fire management and decision support remains limited in part due to the lack of attention paid towards engineering the delivery and communication of this information to key users and decision makers [43,44].…”