Estimating fuel load for wildfire risk assessment at regional scales using earth observation data: A case study in Southwestern Australia

The risk of wildfires is increasing globally and models are critical to reducing this risk. Such models require information on fuel load, a crucial factor of fire behaviour, which is generally determined using a combination of fuel age and fuel accumulation models. Traditionally, estimating fuel load relies on manually compiled fire history data (MCFH). In this paper, we introduce an approach to estimate fuel load using readily available earth observation (EO) data, MODIS MCD64A1. The approach is applied to a wildfire-prone region in Southwestern Australia from 2001 to 2021. Results suggest that MODIS produces more accurate and reliable estimates of fuel load compared with MCFH. It is effective in maintaining spatially and temporally complete records of fires, as it reports 11,019 more hectares of burned areas associated with wildfires over the study period. MODIS performs better in capturing wildfires than prescribed burns, as the spatial overlapping ratio is higher for wildfires (0.63) than prescribed burns (0.42). The high agreement between the two datasets for fuel load estimation (weighted kappa of 0.91) results from grassland covering the majority of the landscape. However, the agreement is reduced for other vegetation types — 0.24 for pine, 0.36 for mallee heath, 0.39 for shrubland, and 0.58 for forest. MODIS has lower effectiveness in detecting small and under-canopy fires such as prescribed burns, suggesting the value in combining EO and manually compiled data to obtain improved estimates of fuel load. Due to the scope of objectives, the integration of EO and MCFH has not been fully explored in this study, which will be included in our future research. This study highlights the potential of earth observation data in assessing wildfire risk as the data are easily accessible and reliable, as well as efficient and cost-effective, and they provide the opportunity to develop mitigation strategies at regional scales.