Database now includes terrain, climate and socio-economic data
By Emma Coke, Ashland.news
Scientists recently updated an online database of fires in Oregon from 1992 and 2020 to aid in wildfire prediction and management, and understanding population vulnerability through the addition of 270 variables, including socio-economic data.
Originally developed in 2013 by the U.S. Forest Service, the Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database has gone through five updates since its inception and includes information about where the fire started, discovery date and final size. The updated database includes four new categories: Weather and climate, land cover and topography, social and economic factors, and administrative factors (distance to fire station or roads, community preparedness).
“What that allows one to do is to get a lot more information about the circumstances under which wildfires ignite and the circumstances under which wildfires with different causes ignite,” said Erica Fleishman, an Oregon State University professor who helped in its development.
For firefighters or forest managers, Fleishman said the richer data is helpful for understanding what can be done to decrease the chance of certain types of fires from starting. They could look at the data and ask context- and location-specific questions.
“One could say, for example, ‘If it’s been a wet year or a dry year, are certain types of ignitions, more or less likely? If the terrain is different, is a particular type of fire more or less likely? Or maybe, is the size of the resulting wildfire likely to be large or small?” Fleishman said.
According to a Southern Oregon fire official, the database is not useful at a local scale.
The inclusion of socio-economic factors further contributes to enhancing wildfire preparedness by providing data on what populations face higher wildfire risk.
For example, Fleishman said some demographic populations are less comfortable with emergency information distributed in English and some are more likely to have access to a computer, radio or a phone to receive that information.
“That could be both in a prevention aspect and it could be in a response capacity or an exposure capacity, thinking about who is most affected and therefore what type of social supports might be necessary following,” Fleishman said.
The update took around a year to complete. Like each of the past four updates, the update came into fruition because the researchers wanted people to have access to better data to ask more complex questions.
“In a sense, it’s somewhat of a public service,” Fleishman said.
The update was also spurred by the researchers realizing how much computing capacity is advancing.
“It’s becoming much easier to work with large datasets and datasets with lots of fields, and to be able to harvest really large sets of information,” Fleishman said. “It was timely to be able to do this. If this information was available, people could use it for a lot of different purposes.”
Fleishman said that there’s even work on incorporating the data into artificial intelligence and deep learning models.
“I would like to see people not lose their lives, not lose their livelihoods and not lose the things that are really important to them in terms of their identity, their community identity,” Fleishman said. “I want people to be able to live a high quality life.”
Email Ashland.news reporter intern Emma Coke at [email protected].
