GIS analysis of physical and human impact on wildfire patterns (original) (raw)

Assessing Spatial Distribution of Fire Effects in Forests Using Gis

2010

Due to past wildfire suppression in the Northwestern United States, forest fires are increasing in both number and intensity. More frequent and intense forest fires represent an increasing threat to both human and natural resources. Two of the major environmental problems related to forest fires are the increases in surface runoff and water erosion during rain and snowmelt events as a result of increased detachment of the mineral soil exposed after the vegetation is burned. The goal of this study was to determine which environmental attributes of the landscape may influence the distribution of mineral soil exposure following wildfire in forested watersheds. In a field investigation two months after a simulated wildfire we measured the changes in ground cover and a number of environmental variables such as: slope, aspect, distance to streams, solar radiation, elevation, curvature, profile curvature to determine their relationships to postfire mineral soil exposure. The study was cond...

Giscience for Forest Fire Modeling: New Advances in Wildland Fires with Management

2021

Wildfire is one of the complex and damaging natural phenomena in the world. Wildfires pose an enormous challenge to predict and monitor complicated integration chemistry with the physical aspects of solid-gas stage combustion and heat transmission spatially diverse vegetations, topography, and detailed time and space conditions at various spatial and time scales. The research community has greatly enhanced its efforts in the last 25 years to better understand wildfires by improving observation, measurement, analysis and modelling. The fast development of spatial data analysis and computer technology has been facilitated. This combination allowed new decision promotion systems, information collection, analysis methods, growth, and existing fire management instruments. In several countries, despite this activity, forest fires remain a serious problem. Factors that raise the world risk of wildfires are climate change, urban-rural migration and the creation of the interface between urba...

A Practical Approach to Assess the Wildfire Ignition and Spreading Capacities of Vegetated Areas at Landscape-scale

2021

We bring a practical and comprehensive GIS-based framework to utilize freely available remote sensed datasets to assess wildfire ignition probability and spreading capacities of vegetated landscapes. The study area consists of the country-level scale of the Romanian territory, characterized by a diversity of vegetated landscapes threatened by the consequences of climate change. We utilize the Wildfire Ignition Probability/ Wildfire Spreading Capacity Index (WIPI/ WSCI). WIPI/ WSCI models rely on a multi-criteria data mining procedure assessing the social, environmental, geophysical, and fuel properties of the study area based on open access remote sensed data. We utilized the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to weigh each indexing criterion's impact factor and assess the model's overall sensitivity. Introducing ROC analysis at an earlier stage of the workflow elevated the final Area Under the Curve (AUC) of WIPI from 0.705 to 0.778 and WSCI from 0.586 to 0.80...

Validation of Forest Fire Hotspot Analysis in Gis Using Forest Fire Contributory Factors

2020

Forest fires have been showing an increasing trend in the past few years. Hundreds of hectares of forests are damaged every year. Thus, it is crucial to identify and implement appropriate forest fire management measures. GIS hotspot analysis has become an advantageous technique for the analysis of spatial clustering of forest fires. However, inadequate research has been undertaken on the validation of forest fire hotspot analysis in GIS. The objective of this paper is to validate forest fire hotspots identified by two statistical-based and one non-statistical-based GIS hotspot analysis methods, namely Getis-Ord Gi*, Anselin Local Moran’s I and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), in a study area. The three hotspot analyses were validated by evaluating the spatial interference between the identified forest fire hotspots by each method and existing forest fire contributory factors. The study found that KDE resulted in better spatial matching of forest fire hotspots and forest fire contrib...

Wildland Urban Interface: mapping and wildfire risk assessment

2014

The Rural Urban Interfaces (RUI), are those areas in which vegetation and houses are in contact or intermingled. Vegetation constitutes the prerequisite for wildfire propagation and, given the high number of values exposed to risk, it is in RUI that the worst consequences of wildfires are recorded and that a wildfire risk assessment is particularly important. The present thesis is divided into two parts: - In the first one RUI are mapped and classified, and a characterization of the relation RUI – fire regime is performed. The study uses three operational definition of RUI and shows how the RUI area largely depends on the adopted definition. Although the maps obtained using various methodologies differs in identifying portions of the territory as RUI, all methodologies consistently recognise that inside RUI the ignition density is higher and the burned areas are smaller than elsewhere. A case study of diachronic mapping shows the utility of RUI mapping and classification for describ...