Deep Learning Models for Predicting Wildfires from Historical Remote-Sensing Data

Fantine Huot, R. Lily Hu, Matthias Ihme, Qing Wang, John Burge, Tianjian Lu, Jason Hickey, Yi-Fan Chen, John Anderson

Published 2020-10-15Version 1

Identifying regions that have high likelihood for wildfires is a key component of land and forestry management and disaster preparedness. We create a data set by aggregating nearly a decade of remote-sensing data and historical fire records to predict wildfires. This prediction problem is framed as three machine learning tasks. Results are compared and analyzed for four different deep learning models to estimate wildfire likelihood. The results demonstrate that deep learning models can successfully identify areas of high fire likelihood using aggregated data about vegetation, weather, and topography with an AUC of 83%.