Remote Sensing of Wildland Fire-Induced Risk Assessment at the Community Level

Abstract

Wildland fires are some of the critical natural hazards that pose a significant threat to the communities located in the vicinity of forested/vegetated areas. In this paper, our overall objective was to study the structural damages due to the 2016 Horse River Fire (HRF) that happened in Fort McMurray (Alberta, Canada) by employing primarily very high spatial resolution optical satellite data, i.e., WorldView-2. Thus, our activities included the: (i) estimation of the structural damages; and (ii) delineation of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) and its associated buffers at certain intervals, and their utilization in assessing potential risks. Our proposed method of remote sensing-based estimates of the number of structural damages was compared with the ground-based information available from the Planning and Development Recovery Committee Task Force of Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB); and found a strong linear relationship (i.e., r2 value of 0.97 with a slope of 0.97). Upon delineating the WUI and its associated buffer zones at 10 m, 30 m, 50 m, 70 m and 100 m distances; we found existence of vegetation within the 30 m buffers from the WUI for all of the damaged structures. In addition, we noticed that the relevant authorities had removed vegetation in some areas between 30 m and 70 m buffers from the WUI, which was proven to be effective in order to protect the structures in the adjacent communities. Furthermore, we mapped the wildland fire-induced vulnerable areas upon considering the WUI and its associated buffers. Our analysis revealed that approximately 30% of the areas within the buffer zones of 10 m and 30 m were vulnerable due to the presence of vegetation; in which, approximately 7% were burned during the 2016 HRF event that led the structural damages. Consequently, we suggest to remove the existing vegetation within these critical zones and also monitor the region at a regular interval in order to reduce the wildland fire-induced risk.

Prototype Downscaling Algorithm for MODIS Satellite 1 km Daytime Active Fire Detections

“…Active fire detections have been shown to be correlated [41] well with burned area and such downscaled active fire product may find immediate application in such studies. Furthermore, improved spatial resolution will help studies investigating and monitoring active fire locations and its proximities to wildland urban interfaces [60]. Currently, within the United States there are three national burn mapping projects that could potentially benefit from the higher spatial resolution active fire mapping, including the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) [61], Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) [62], and LANDFIRE [63].…”

Development of Land-Use/Land-Cover Maps Using Landsat-8 and MODIS Data, and Their Integration for Hydro-Ecological Applications

“…The last two major wildfires (known as the Lesser Slave Lake fire in 2011 and the Fort MacMurray (Horse River) fire in 2016) altered the forest coverage of the watershed. Together, they affected more than 100,000 people and caused more than 9.5 billion CAD in economic losses [37].…”

Lessons Learned from the Development of Open Educational Resources at Post-Secondary Level in the Field of Environmental Modelling: An Exploratory Study

“…If any materials were published under one of the CC BY licenses other than CC BY-ND, then we adopted/adapted it with appropriate attributions. Figure 1 is an example of the adoption of a graphic available from Ahmed et al [35] that was originally published under a CC BY 4.0 license inside a research article. It depicts the wildland-urban interface (WUI), as shown by a dotted yellow line, along with buffer zones at 10 m, 30 m, 50 m, 70 m, and 100 m. In fact, panel (a) in Figure 1 shows an example of areas where forest/plants were removed to protect nearby communities from wildfire.…”