Methodological Proposal for Automated Detection of the Wildland–Urban Interface: Application to the Metropolitan Regions of Madrid and Barcelona

Andrea Zambrano-Ballesteros,Alfredo Ramón-Morte,José Tomás Navarro-Carrión,Sabina Florina Nanu

doi:10.3390/ijgi10060381

Andrea Zambrano-Ballesteros, Alfredo Ramón-Morte + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10060381

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Abstract

Official information on Land Use Land Cover is essential for mapping wildland–urban interface (WUI) zones. However, these resources do not always provide the geometrical or thematic accuracy required to delimit buildings that are easily exposed to risk of wildfire at the appropriate scale. This research shows that the integration of active remote sensing and official Land Use Land Cover (LULC) databases, such as the Spanish Land Use Land Cover information system (SIOSE), creates the synergy capable of achieving this. An automated method was developed to detect WUI zones by the massive geoprocessing of data from official and open repositories of the Spanish national plan for territory observation (PNOT) of the Spanish national geographic institute (IGN), and it was tested in the most important metropolitan zones in Spain: Barcelona and Madrid. The processing of trillions of LiDAR data and their integration with thousands of SIOSE polygons were managed in a Linux environment, with libraries for geographic processing and a PostgreSQL database server. All this allowed the buildings that are exposed to wildfire risk with a high level of accuracy to be obtained with a methodology that can be applied anywhere in the Spanish territory.

Highlights

Despite the scientific and technological developments in recent years, there are still natural phenomena that cause loss of human lives and high socio-economic costs in the context of climate change that may increase their severity and frequency
Spanish Land Use Land Cover information system (SIOSE) has proven to be a key tool for the identification of exposed zones in the wildland–urban interface
Land Use Land Cover (LULC) databases in terms of thematic possibilities and geometric accuracy and, if properly exploited, it allows for the identification of the phenomenon under study for the study zones in 94% of the areas exposed in the intermix situation, and between 88% and 92%

Summary

Introduction

Despite the scientific and technological developments in recent years, there are still natural phenomena that cause loss of human lives and high socio-economic costs in the context of climate change that may increase their severity and frequency. There is an increase in density in these zones due to the proximity of human activities to the forest zone and an increase in the vulnerability of forest vegetation produced by the abandonment of traditional agricultural activities in the peri-urban environments of large cities and holiday dwellings. The expansion of these WUI zones in the United States was very significant [5] and it has substantially increased the cost of wildfire suppression and the treatment of forest fuels, not to mention the damage that they cause [6]. This is the situation in Spain [7] and has led to detailed studies on its legal regulation in Europe and in Spain, considering the changes in the LULC data and the increased vulnerability that this creates [8]

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