Abstract
Wildfires are expected to increase in the near future, mainly because of climate changes and land use management. One of the most vulnerable areas in the world is the forest in central-South America, including Bolivia. Despite that this country is highly prone to wildfires, literature is rather limited here. To fill this gap, we implemented a dataset including the burned area that occurred in the department of Santa Cruz in the period of 2010–2019, and the digital spatial data describing the predisposing factors (i.e., topography, land cover, ecoregions). The main goal was to develop a model, based on Random Forest, in which probabilistic outputs allowed to elaborate wildfires susceptibility maps. The overall accuracy was finally estimated by using 5-fold cross-validation. In addition, the last three years of observations acted as the testing dataset, allowing to evaluate the predictive performance of the model. The quantitative assessment of the variables revealed that “flooded savanna” and “shrub or herbaceous cover, flooded, fresh/saline/brakish water” are respectively the ecoregions and land cover classes with the highest probability of predicting wildfires. This study contributes to the development and validation of an innovative mapping tool for fire risk assessment, implementable at a regional scale in different areas of the globe.
Highlights
Outputs of Random Forests (RF) are probabilistic values, expressing the probability of burning for each pixel under the assumption of a set of predisposing factors, namely altitude, slope, ecoregions, and land cover. These results provided the necessary information for the elaboration of a wildfire susceptibility map for the department of Santa Cruz (Figure 7)
The 25% of the area with the highest probability of burning resulted to be more concentrated in the east and southeastern sectors. These areas are mainly characterized by the flooded savanna and Cerrado ecoregions, and by the land cover class shrub or herbaceous cover, flooded, fresh/saline/brakish water, which is very prone to wildfires
Slash-and-burn is a common practice in these areas, since they are the most exploited by humans for agriculture, livestock, and logging
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Wildfires are perturbing events affecting ecological processes and are part of the dynamics of many ecosystems in the world, influencing their composition, structure, and functioning. These hazards can cause significant losses in terms of vegetation, houses, and human and animal lives [1,2,3]. Wildfires are becoming more frequent and extended in the last years, mainly under the influence of climate changes [4,5,6] and land use management [7,8,9,10]
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