Wildfire Prediction Model Based on Spatial and Temporal Characteristics: A Case Study of a Wildfire in Portugal’s Montesinho Natural Park

Abstract

Wildfires influence the global carbon cycle, and the regularity of wildfires is mostly determined by elements such as meteorological conditions, combustible material states, and human activities. The time series and spatial dispersion of wildfires have been studied by some scholars. Wildfire samples were acquired in a monthly series for the Montesinho Natural Park historical fire site dataset (January 2000 to December 2003), which can be used to assess the possible effects of geographical and temporal variations on forest fires. Based on the above dataset, dynamic wildfire distribution thresholds were examined using a K-means++ clustering technique for each subgroup, and monthly series data were categorized as flammable or non-flammable depending on the thresholds. A five-fold hierarchical cross-validation strategy was used to train four machine learning models: extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree (DT). Finally, to explore the performance of those we have mentioned, we used accuracy (ACC), F1 score (F1), and the values for the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristics (ROCs). The results depicted that the XGBoost model works best under the evaluation of the three metrics (ACC = 0.8132, F1 = 0.7862, and AUC = 0.8052). The model performance is significantly improved when compared to the approach of classifying wildfires by burned area size (ACC = 72.3%), demonstrating that spatiotemporal heterogeneity has a broad influence on wildfire occurrence. The law of a spatiotemporal distribution connection in wildfires could aid in the prediction and management of wildfires and fire disasters.