Mesoscale spatiotemporal predictive models of daily human- and lightning-caused wildland fire occurrence in British Columbia
Khurram Nadeem A * , S. W. Taylor B E * , Douglas G. Woolford C and C. B. Dean D
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A University of Guelph, 50 Stone Road E, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada.
B Pacific Forestry Centre, Natural Resources Canada, 506 West Burnside Road, Victoria, BC V8Z 1M5, Canada.
C University of Western Ontario,1151 Richmond Street, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada.
D University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue W, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.
E Corresponding author. Email: steve.taylor@canada.ca
International Journal of Wildland Fire 29(1) 11-27 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF19058
Submitted: 9 April 2019 Accepted: 16 October 2019 Published: 24 December 2019
Journal Compilation © IAWF 2020 Open Access CC BY-NC-ND
Abstract
We developed three models of daily human- and lightning-caused fire occurrence to support fire management preparedness and detection planning in the province of British Columbia, Canada, using a lasso-logistic framework. Novel aspects of our work involve (1) using an ensemble of models that were created using 500 datasets balanced (through response-selective sampling) to have equal numbers of fire and non-fire observations; (2) the use of a new ranking algorithm to address the difficulty in interpreting variable importance in models with a large number of covariates. We also introduce the use of cause-specific average spatial daily fire occurrence, termed baseline risk, as a covariate for missing or poorly estimated factors that influence human and lightning fire occurrence. All three models have strong predictive ability, with areas under the Receiver Operator Characteristic curve exceeding 0.9.
Additional keywords: fire danger, fire occurrence modelling.
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