Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 76
Visibility-informed mapping of potential firefighter lookout locations using maximum entropy modelling
Year: 2024
BackgroundSituational awareness is an essential component of wildland firefighter safety. In the US, crew lookouts provide situational awareness by proxy from ground-level locations with visibility of both fire and crew members.AimsTo use machine learning to predict potential lookout locations based on incident data, mapped visibility, topography, vegetation, and roads.MethodsLidar-derived topographic and fuel structural variables were used to generate maps of visibility across 30 study areas that possessed lookout location data. Visibility…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating driving behavior patterns during wildfire evacuations in wildland-urban interface zones using connected vehicles data
Year: 2024
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire. Understanding the driving behavior of individuals to evacuate fire-affected WUI areas is important as the evacuees may encounter low visibility and difficult driving conditions due to burning material and steep topography. This study investigates the driving behavior patterns of individuals during historical wildfire events in rural and urban areas with mandatory evacuation orders using a connected vehicle…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A fast spectral recovery does not necessarily indicate post-fire forest recovery
Year: 2024
BackgroundClimate change has increased wildfire activity in the western USA and limited the capacity for forests to recover post-fire, especially in areas burned at high severity. Land managers urgently need a better understanding of the spatiotemporal variability in natural post-fire forest recovery to plan and implement active recovery projects. In burned areas, post-fire “spectral recovery”, determined by examining the trajectory of multispectral indices (e.g., normalized burn ratio) over time, generally corresponds with recovery of multiple post-fire vegetation types, including trees and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pixels to pyrometrics: UAS-derived infrared imagery to evaluate and monitor prescribed fire behaviour and effects
Year: 2024
Background: Prescribed fire is vital for fuel reduction and ecological restoration, but the effectiveness and fine-scale interactions are poorly understood. Aims: We developed methods for processing uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) imagery into spatially explicit pyrometrics, including measurements of fuel consumption, rate of spread, and residence time to quantitatively measure three prescribed fires. Methods: We collected infrared (IR) imagery continuously (0.2 Hz) over prescribed burns and one experimental calibration burn, capturing…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Biogeographic patterns of daily wildfire spread and extremes across North America
Year: 2024
Introduction: Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme single-day fire spread events, with major ecological and social implications. In contrast with well-documented spatio-temporal patterns of wildfire ignitions and perimeters, daily progression remains poorly understood across continental spatial scales, particularly for extreme single-day events (“blow ups”). Here, we characterize daily wildfire spread across North America, including occurrence of extreme single-day events, duration and seasonality of fire and extremes, and ecoregional climatic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Ladder fuels rather than canopy volumes consistently predict wildfire severity even in extreme topographic-weather conditions
Year: 2024
Drivers of forest wildfire severity include fuels, topography and weather. However, because only fuels can be actively managed, quantifying their effects on severity has become an urgent research priority. Here we employed GEDI spaceborne lidar to consistently assess how pre-fire forest fuel structure affected wildfire severity across 42 California wildfires between 2019–2021. Using a spatial-hierarchical modeling framework, we found a positive concave-down relationship between GEDI-derived fuel structure and wildfire severity, marked by increasing severity with greater fuel loads until a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring the use of satellite Earth observation active wildland fire hotspot data via open access web platforms
Year: 2024
Globally, managing wildland fire is increasing in complexity. Satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, specifically active fire ‘hotspot’ data, is often used to inform wildland fire management. This study explores hotspot data usage via web traffic data (‘user counts’) for the FIRMS, GWIS and EFFIS web portals between September 2019 and April 2023. Global active fire data use is characterized by multi-month periods of relatively low, stable user counts, interspersed with periodic spikes (4.1x median monthly activity) of activity broadly aligned with the North American / European fire season (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using soil moisture information to better understand and predict wildfire danger: a review of recent developments and outstanding questions
Year: 2023
Soil moisture conditions are represented in fire danger rating systems mainly through simple drought indices based on meteorological variables, even though better sources of soil moisture information are increasingly available. This review summarises a growing body of evidence indicating that greater use of in situ, remotely sensed, and modelled soil moisture information in fire danger rating systems could lead to better estimates of dynamic live and dead herbaceous fuel loads, more accurate live and dead fuel moisture predictions, earlier warning of wildfire danger, and better forecasts of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating driving behavior patterns during wildfire evacuations in wildland-urban interface zones using connected vehicles data
Year: 2023
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire. Understanding the driving behavior of individuals to evacuate fire-affected WUI areas is important as the evacuees may encounter low visibility and difficult driving conditions due to burning material and steep topography. This study investigates the driving behavior patterns of individuals during historical wildfire events in rural and urban areas with mandatory evacuation orders using a connected vehicle…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Metrics and Considerations for Evaluating How Forest Treatments Alter Wildfire Behavior and Effects
Year: 2023
The influence of forest treatments on wildfire effects is challenging to interpret. This is, in part, because the impact forest treatments have on wildfire can be slight and variable across many factors. Effectiveness of a treatment also depends on the metric considered. We present and define human–fire interaction, fire behavior, and ecological metrics of forest treatment effects on wildfire and discuss important considerations and recommendations for evaluating treatments. We demonstrate these concepts using a case study from the Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado, USA. Pre-fire forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Different approaches make comparing studies of burn severity challenging: a review of methods used to link remotely sensed data with the Composite Burn Index
Year: 2023
The Composite Burn Index (CBI) is commonly linked to remotely sensed data to understand spatial and temporal patterns of burn severity. However, a comprehensive understanding of the tradeoffs between different methods used to model CBI with remotely sensed data is lacking. To help understand the current state of the science, provide a blueprint towards conducting broad- scale meta-analyses, and identify key decision points and potential rationale, we conducted a review of studies that linked remotely sensed data to continuous estimates of burn severity measured with the CBI and related…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burnover events identified during the 2018 Camp Fire
Year: 2023
Background: The Camp Fire burned through communities in Butte County, California, on 8 November 2018. The fire destroyed over 18 000 structures and caused 85 fatalities, mostly within the first 12 h of the incident. Aims: A post-fire case study was conducted to learn from the devastating incident. Methods: The case study was supported by detailed first-hand accounts from 157 first responders, photos and videos, first responder radio logs, and other field data. Subsequent analysis and data integration yielded a timeline reconstruction of the first 24 h of the entire event, as well as…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Projecting live fuel moisture content via deep learning
Year: 2023
Background: Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) is a key environmental indicator used to monitor for high wildfire risk conditions. Many statistical models have been proposed to predict LFMC from remotely sensed data; however, almost all these estimate current LFMC (nowcasting models). Accurate modelling of LFMC in advance (projection models) would provide wildfire managers with more timely information for assessing and preparing for wildfire risk. Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the potential for deep learning models to predict LFMC across the continental United States 3 months…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Consistent, high-accuracy mapping of daily and sub-daily wildfire growth with satellite observations
Year: 2023
Background: Fire research and management applications, such as fire behaviour analysis and emissions modelling, require consistent, highly resolved spatiotemporal information on wildfire growth progression. Aims: We developed a new fire mapping method that uses quality-assured sub-daily active fire/thermal anomaly satellite retrievals (2003–2020 MODIS and 2012–2020 VIIRS data) to develop a high-resolution wildfire growth dataset, including growth areas, perimeters, and cross-referenced fire information from agency reports. Methods: Satellite fire detections were buffered using a historical…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Satellite-derived prefire vegetation predicts variation in field-based invasive annual grass cover after fir
Year: 2023
AimsInvasion by annual grasses (IAGs) and concomitant increases in wildfire are impacting many drylands globally, and an understanding of factors that contribute to or detract from community resistance to IAGs is needed to inform postfire restoration interventions. Prefire vegetation condition is often unknown in rangelands but it likely affects variation in postfire invasion resistance across large burned scars. Whether satellite-derived products like the Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) can fulfill prefire information needs and be used to parametrize models of fire recovery to inform…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The analysis of traffic data of wildfire evacuation: the case study of the 2020 Glass Fire
Year: 2023
Evacuation is a crucial policy to mitigate wildfire impacts. Understanding traffic dynamics during a wildfire evacuation can help authorities to improve in improving emergency management plans, thus improving life safety. In this study, we developed a methodology to extract historical traffic data from vehicle detector stations and automate the analysis of traffic dynamics for actual wildfire evacuations. This has been implemented in an open-access tool called Traffic Dynamic Analyser (TDA) which generates speed-density and flow-density relationships from data using both commonly used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Quantifying burned area of wildfires in the western United States from polar-orbiting and geostationary satellite active-fire detections
Year: 2023
Background: Accurately estimating burned area from satellites is key to improving biomass burning emission models, studying fire evolution and assessing environmental impacts. Previous studies have found that current methods for estimating burned area of fires from satellite active-fire data do not always provide an accurate estimate. Aims and methods: In this work, we develop a novel algorithm to estimate hourly accumulated burned area based on the area from boundaries of non-convex polygons containing the accumulated Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) active-fire detections.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Power Grid/Wildfire Nexus: Using GIS and Satellite Remote Sensing to Identify Vulnerabilities
Year: 2023
The effects of wildfire on the power grid are a recurring concern for utility companies who need reliable information about where to prioritize infrastructure hardening. Though there are existing data layers that provide measures of burn probability, these models predominately consider long-term climate variables, which are not helpful when analyzing current season trends. Utility companies need data that are temporally and locally relevant. To determine the primary drivers of burn probability relative to power grid vulnerability, this study assessed potential wildfire drivers that are both…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Deterioration of air quality associated with the 2020 US wildfires
Year: 2023
The wildfires of August and September 2020 in the western part of the United States were characterized by an unparalleled duration and wide geographical coverage. A particular consequence of massive wildfires includes serious health effects due to short and long-term exposure to poor air quality. Using a variety of data sources including aerosol optical depth (AOD) and ultraviolet aerosol index (UVAI), obtained with the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) and Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), combined…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest-Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Annual forest area burned (AFAB) in the western United States (US) has increased as a positive exponential function of rising aridity in recent decades. This non-linear response has important implications for AFAB in a changing climate, yet the cause of the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship has not been given rigorous attention. We investigated the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship in western US forests using a new 1984–2019 database of fire events and 2001–2020 satellite-based records of daily fire growth. While forest-fire frequency and duration grow linearly with aridity, the…
Publication Type: Journal Article