Katherine A. Mistick, Michael J. Campbell, Philip E. Dennison
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background
Situational awareness is an essential component of wildland firefighter safety. In the US, crew lookouts provide situational awareness by proxy from ground-level locations with visibility of both fire and crew members.
Aims
To use machine learning to predict potential lookout locations based on incident data, mapped visibility, topography, vegetation, and roads.
Methods
Lidar-derived topographic and fuel structural variables were used to generate maps of visibility across 30 study areas that possessed lookout location data. Visibility at multiple viewing distances, distance to roads, topographic position index, canopy height, and canopy cover served as predictors in presence-only maximum entropy modelling to predict lookout suitability based on 66 known lookout locations from recent fires.
Key results and conclusions
The model yielded a receiver-operating characteristic area under the curve of 0.929 with 67% of lookouts correctly identified by the model using a 0.5 probability threshold. Spatially explicit model prediction resulted in a map of the probability a location would be suitable for a lookout; when combined with a map of dominant view direction these tools could provide meaningful support to fire crews.
Implications
This approach could be applied to produce maps summarising potential lookout suitability and dominant view direction across wildland environments for use in pre-fire planning.
期刊介绍:
International Journal of Wildland Fire publishes new and significant articles that advance basic and applied research concerning wildland fire. Published papers aim to assist in the understanding of the basic principles of fire as a process, its ecological impact at the stand level and the landscape level, modelling fire and its effects, as well as presenting information on how to effectively and efficiently manage fire. The journal has an international perspective, since wildland fire plays a major social, economic and ecological role around the globe.
The International Journal of Wildland Fire is published on behalf of the International Association of Wildland Fire.