Improving Wildfire Danger Assessment Using Time Series Features of Weather and Fuel in the Great Xing’an Mountain Region, China

Abstract

Wildfires directly threaten the safety of life and property. Predicting wildfires with a model driven by wildfire danger factors can significantly reduce losses. Weather conditions continuously influence the drying rate of fuel as well as the occurrence probability and danger degree of wildfires. Previous studies have paid little attention to the continuous effects of weather and fuel on wildfires. This study improved the accuracy and effect of wildfire danger assessment using the time series features of weather and fuel. First, the time series features of weather and fuel factors within the 16 days before the fire were analyzed. Then, four feature groups were selected—feature group without time series values, feature group with time series values, feature group with Tsfresh transformation of time series values, and feature group with gradient and cumulative transformation of time series values—and three models were trained, respectively: random forest, balanced random forest, and extreme gradient boosting. The results showed that the f1-score of all feature groups with time series values (0.93) increased by 0.15, on average, compared with those without time series values (0.78) for the three models. The feature group with gradient and cumulative features had a more stable prediction accuracy and a more accurate wildfire danger map. The results suggest that using the appropriate time series features of weather and fuel can help improve the precision and effect of the wildfire danger assessment model.