Analysis of Forest Fire Dynamics, Distribution and Main Drivers in the Atlantic Forest

Minerva Singh and Zhuhua Huang
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Minerva Singh: The Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, The Weeks Building, 16–18 Princes’ Gardens, London SW7 1NE, UK
Zhuhua Huang: Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London, The Weeks Building, 16–18 Princes’ Gardens, London SW7 1NE, UK

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: The fire susceptibility of the Atlantic Forest has largely increased over the past two decades due to a combination of climate change and anthropogenic factors such as land cover change and human modification. High rates of forest fragmentation have contributed to escalating fires in this imperilled global biodiversity hotspot. Understanding fire patterns is essential to developing an effective forest fire management strategy. In this research, we utilized the Random Forest (RF) machine learning approach for identifying the role of climatic and anthropogenic factors in influencing fire occurrence probability and mapping the spatial distribution of fire risk. We found that the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index value and climate variables (i.e., temperature and solar radiation) were significant drivers of fire occurrence risk. Results also confirm that forest fragmentation increases with fire density in the region.

Keywords: fire dynamics; machine learning; deforestation; biodiversity; amazon forest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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