Zihui Ma , Guangxiao Hu , Ting-Syuan Lin , Lingyao Li , Songhua Hu , Loni Hagen , Gregory B. Baecher
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
The increasing frequency and severity of wildfires pose significant risks to communities, infrastructure, and the environment, especially in Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas. Effective disaster management requires understanding how the public perceives and responds to wildfire threats in near-real-time. This study uses social media data to assess public responses (including collective perceptions/reactions) and explores how these responses are linked to city-level community characteristics. Specifically, we leveraged a transformer-based topic modeling technique called BERTopic to identify wildfire response-related topics and then utilized the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model to compute two key metrics — public response awareness and resilience indicators. Additionally, we used GIS-based spatial analysis to map wildfire responses and the relationships with four groups of city-level factors (racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, demographic, and wildfire-specific). Our findings reveal significant geographic and socio-spatial differences in public responses. Southern California cities with larger Hispanic populations demonstrate higher wildfire awareness and resilience. In contrast, urbanized regions in Central and Northern California exhibit lower awareness levels. Furthermore, resilience is negatively correlated with unemployment rates, particularly in southern regions where higher unemployment aligns with reduced resilience. These findings highlight the need for targeted and equitable wildfire management strategies to improve the adaptive capacity of WUI communities.
期刊介绍:
Computers, Environment and Urban Systemsis an interdisciplinary journal publishing cutting-edge and innovative computer-based research on environmental and urban systems, that privileges the geospatial perspective. The journal welcomes original high quality scholarship of a theoretical, applied or technological nature, and provides a stimulating presentation of perspectives, research developments, overviews of important new technologies and uses of major computational, information-based, and visualization innovations. Applied and theoretical contributions demonstrate the scope of computer-based analysis fostering a better understanding of environmental and urban systems, their spatial scope and their dynamics.