Geospatial information on geographical and human factors improved anthropogenic fire occurrence modeling in the Chinese boreal forest

Abstract

We applied a classic logistic regression (LR) model together with a geographically weighted logistic regression (GWLR) model to determine the relationship between anthropogenic fire occurrence and potential driving factors in the Chinese boreal forest and to test whether the explanatory power of the LR model could be increased by considering geospatial information of geographical and human factors using a GWLR model. Three tests, “all variables”, “significant variables”, and “cross-validation”, were applied to compare model performance between the LR and GWLR models. Our results confirmed the importance of distance to railway, elevation, length of fire line, and vegetation cover on fire occurrence in the Chinese boreal forest. In addition, the GWLR model performs better than the LR model in terms of model prediction accuracy, model residual reduction, and spatial parameter estimation by considering geospatial information of explanatory variables. This indicates that the global LR model is incapable of identifying underlying causal factors for wildfire modeling sufficiently. The GWLR model helped identify spatial variation between driving factors and fire occurrence, which can contribute better understanding of forest fire occurrence over large geographic areas and the forest fire management practices may be improved based on it.