Mesoscale spatiotemporal predictive models of daily human- and lightning-caused wildland fire occurrence in British Columbia

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.