Wildfire Prediction

Wildfire spread is traditionally predicted using physics-based simulators, which are physically interpretable but whose cost increases with each additional ensemble member. We ask how well deep learning surrogates can reproduce these simulations at a fraction of this cost, training them on 10,584 fire spread simulations at 2m resolution for the Rectoret region in Catalonia, Spain. Four architectures are compared: a patch-based U-Net, a transfer-learned ResNet-50, a physics-informed network constrained by the wind-driven advection equation and a Swin-Unet transformer. Among the terrain and vegetation variables, only surface fuel load predicts burn probability with any strength (r = 0.27) and including it lowers prediction error by 21%. The remaining variables correlate weakly and are highly duplicative. Next, an experiment with saliency, occlusion and rotation demonstrates the models' learning. Convolutional models rely primarily on distance from the current fire front, while Swin-Unet assigns more weight to fuel and terrain, a finding also noted in an unrelated wildfire dataset. When applied without retraining to the second region, Pedriza, all three convolutional models still predict fire spread, losing accuracy by a small but systematic margin.

Next-day wildfire prediction requires models whose forecasts can be evaluated alongside the assumptions and historical evidence used in their computation. Although deep learning can learn spatial patterns from remote-sensing data, predictive performance alone does not establish physical fidelity or operational trustworthiness. This study investigates three modular augmentations for next-day active-fire prediction: wind- and slope-conditioned attention biases, physics-feature retrieval-augmented output correction, and fire conditioned dual-stream gating. The attention biases expose prescribed directional preferences, while the retrieval module selects historical tiles using a nine-dimensional environmental and fire-state descriptor and applies a learned correction to a frozen model's logits. The modules are evaluated across five backbones on the Next Day Wildfire Spread benchmark, using staged ablations, directional audits, retrieval perturbations, calibration measures, and computational comparisons. The three-seed mean F1 score and area under the precision--recall curve (AUC-PR) of a SwinUNETR model with all three augmentations are 0.4216 and 0.3673. Then, a mixed ensemble (two augmented architectures and one non-augmented architecture) model achieves 0.4292 and 0.3790. Benefits vary across architectures, and retrieval-related improvements in AUC-PR do not consistently translate into higher F1. The constructed wind bias aligns closely with input wind, but its alignment with observed next-day fire displacement is much weaker, distinguishing prior inspectability from predictive physical fidelity. The study contributes a framework for exposing and evaluating selected domain-informed components within wildfire prediction models. Together, the results presented show that predictive performance, operational trustworthiness, and computational practicality need not be competing objectives.

This article describes an open image dataset for developing and evaluating active-fire segmentation methods in satellite imagery. The dataset contains 2,148 image-mask pairs from 25 California wildfires, with acquisitions spanning July 2020 to August 2026. Each image is a 512x512-pixel, three-channel composite derived from Sentinel-2 Level-2A bands B12, B11 and B8A at 20 m spatial sampling. A fixed linear rendering is applied throughout the dataset. Corresponding masks distinguish background, SWIR-rule active fire and invalid observations. The masks were generated from shortwave-infrared brightness and near-infrared contrast, followed by constrained neighborhood growth. The release includes chip-level metadata and an incident-disjoint partition containing 18 training, three validation and four test fires. Among the image pairs, 841 contain active-fire labels; these labels occupy 0.0766% of all grid cells. A mask-blind analyst review covers 233 test chips and provides a separate assessment of the rule-generated labels at chip and connected-component levels. Reference training and evaluation code accompanies the data, including a ResNet-34 U-Net implementation with validation-based checkpoint and threshold selection. The archived images, masks, metadata and review annotations support research on rare-class segmentation, learning from algorithmic labels and transfer across fire incidents. The versioned dataset is deposited on Zenodo, with preparation and reuse software maintained in a public GitHub repository.

Objects in post-fire environments often undergo irreversible physical transformations that change their geometry, material state, and visual appearance. Detecting and identifying these remnants is critical for locating hazards, reconstructing pre-incident contents, and inventorying losses. Unlike standard image corruptions, these degradations affect the physical structure of the object itself. To study this setting, we introduce TRACE, a transformation-aware benchmark for post-fire object understanding. TRACE contains 21.4K real-image-grounded synthetic scenes and paired object-level pristine-to-degraded progressions spanning 499 object identities across 189 categories. We define five tasks targeting localization and pre-degradation understanding: degraded-object detection, pristine-state recovery and retrieval, original material recovery, pristine description generation, and functional reasoning. Existing models degrade sharply with severity. From the least to the most severe level, RF-DETR mAP decreases by 71% relative, while InternVL3.5 retrieval R@1 falls from 93.85 to 28.11. To address this, we propose the Feature Recovery Module (FRM), a plug-and-play module that maps degraded encoder features to pristine-aligned representations while keeping the host frozen. Trained only with paired feature supervision, FRM improves scene-level detection, CLIP/SigLIP2 feature recovery, and all four object-level VLM tasks, with larger gains under more severe degradation. Across VLM hosts and severity levels, relative gains average 12.5% for retrieval, 20.1% for material recovery, 13.2% for description generation, and 12.4% for functional reasoning.

This study develops a deep reinforcement learning framework for training Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agents to navigate and monitor simulated wildfire environments. Results show that agents learn increasingly stable and effective behaviors over time, as demonstrated by converging loss trends, improved reward signals, and more consistent navigation patterns such as fire-boundary tracking. Overall, these findings highlight the potential of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based UAV systems for autonomous wildfire monitoring and suggest that environmental structure and reward design influence policy effectiveness.

Climate change is increasing the severity and unpredictability of natural disasters. In time-critical crises such as wildfires, traditional monitoring practices remain limited by coverage, cost, and personnel risk, paving the way for autonomous and adaptive monitoring solutions. Within this context, this paper introduces D3ARC, an asynchronous distributed hierarchical framework for time-aware and reliable wildfire detection. D3ARC integrates multiple robotic agents that cooperate under uncertainty through distributed perception, shared situational awareness and coordinated actions. A remote controller asynchronously decides upon each robot's motion, while each robotic agent senses the environment and decides where and how to execute the wildfire detection. All robotic operations require time, and as time progresses, wildfires continue to spread, reducing the opportunity for early intervention. As such, all agents share a common objective: to detect a wildfire with a certain performance threshold as fast as possible and within a time limit. D3ARC integrates mechanisms for safe navigation, coverage efficiency, cooperation and reliability. It introduces a forward-looking capability that allows agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons, achieving an overall mission success up to 94% with 89.4% detection confidence.

Active wildfire mapping from satellite imagery is challenging due to the sparse and highly imbalanced nature of fire pixels, especially in early-stage or low-density fire observations. This work investigates the use of multispectral Landsat-8 imagery for active-fire segmentation under multi-scale wildfire size conditions. We propose a data-driven protocol to characterize fire-region size distributions through connected-component analysis and an interquartile range criterion, enabling the evaluation of model robustness across different local fire-region densities. Three segmentation architectures, U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer, are evaluated under different SWIR-based spectral configurations. Results show that U-Net achieves the strongest robustness across the evaluated conditions, SegFormer provides competitive performance, and DeepLabV3+ tends to produce conservative predictions with reduced recall. Across architectures, SWIR2 consistently achieves the strongest or near-best results, highlighting its importance for active-fire segmentation in Landsat-8 imagery. These findings suggest that both spectral band selection and architectural design are critical for robust satellite-based active wildfire mapping trained on low active fire-pixel density images.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising platform for firefighting operations due to their flexibility, low operational cost, and ability to acquire high-resolution imagery in locations that may be difficult or dangerous to access using conventional methods. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved the capabilities of UAV-based wildfire monitoring systems. The present work investigates RGB-infrared fusion for binary wildfire segmentation on the FLAME3 dataset. In this Study, RGB and Infrared baselines are compared with three representative fusion strategies across three segmentation architectures, including U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer. The key motivation of this work is to analyze the contribution of each modality, evaluate the impact of fusion timing, and examine how different network architectures exploit multimodal information for UAV wildfire delineation. The findings indicate that thermal information plays a dominant role in UAV segmentation and that feature-level multimodal fusion combined with transformer-based architectures offers the most promising direction for future research.

Satellite mega-constellations are emerging as large-scale sensing, communication, and computation fabrics, yet their learning architectures remain largely inherited from terrestrial federated learning and ground-centric mission operations--- ill-suited to satellites that differ by orders of magnitude in Size, Weight, Power, and Cost (SWAP-C), radiation tolerance, link availability, and propagation delay. We propose a heterogeneous federated learning method based on the FractalNet architecture for orbital edge intelligence. We formalize contact-window-constrained, depth-heterogeneous federated optimization and introduce a distributed path scheduler that assigns model depth as a function of SWAP-C constraints, predicted inter-satellite contacts, and training statistics. To reduce message overhead and energy consumption, each tier pools updates periodically rather than at every contact opportunity, and a three-tier agentic control plane governs in-space scheduling, anomaly escalation, and policy-governed autonomy. As a case study, we apply the framework to wildfire detection, where each orbital shell naturally learns a different semantic level of situational awareness: pixel-scale thermal anomalies at low Earth orbit (LEO), regional fire-front dynamics at medium Earth orbit (MEO), and larger-scale risk propagation at geostationary or high Earth orbit (GEO/HEO). Experiments on simulated mega-constellations validate the approach across convergence, communication efficiency, energy adaptation, scheduled-pooling savings, robustness, and latency.

Accurate large-scale wildfire spread modelling requires models that capture both the environmental conditions associated with fire occurrence and the local dynamics of fire propagation. We propose a three-stage framework that combines a Random Forest (RF) model with a cellular automaton (CA). First, an RF model trained on the 2021 Canadian fire season estimates daily pixel-level fire-occurrence probabilities. Second, quantile gradient boosting models provide optional spread-rate priors for sensitivity analysis. Third, an RF-informed CA combines the RF probability layer with neighbourhood-driven spread on a 5 km grid. The RF model achieved AUC values of 0.725--0.795 on the 2022--2024 datasets, while the RF-informed CA achieved substantially higher spatial overlap than the evaluated CA-only baselines in the 2023 simulation. A higher-resolution simulation provides an additional qualitative assessment of local spatial errors. These results suggest that combining RF-derived probabilities with local CA spread can improve large-scale wildfire simulations under the tested conditions.

Wildfire susceptibility mapping typically relies on physical variables assembled from multiple remote-sensing, climate, and geospatial products. AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) provides analysis-ready geospatial embeddings that may reduce this dependence on heavy harmonisation and task-specific feature engineering, but their value for wildfire susceptibility mapping has not been systematically evaluated. Using Victoria, Australia (2017-2025), as a case study, we show that AEF embeddings can reconstruct commonly used variables in wildfire susceptibility analysis with high accuracy. In downstream susceptibility models trained on satellite-derived fire occurrence data, embedding-based susceptibility models achieve ROC-AUC values above 0.92 and consistently identify high wildfire susceptibility across eastern Victoria, particularly Gippsland and the north-eastern uplands, with additional localized hotspots in central and northwestern Victoria. A key feature of AEF embeddings is their strong near-region transferability within climatically similar regions. When embedding-based models trained in Victoria are applied to Canberra and Western Sydney-Blue Mountains, ROC-AUC improves by around 4% at Canberra and declines by around 2% at Western Sydney-Blue Mountains, compared with a mean decrease of approximately 25% for physical-variable models. These findings provide practical guidance for using AEF embeddings and lay a foundation for scalable wildfire susceptibility mapping workflows for downstream users such as government agencies and (re)insurers.

Prediction of post-wildfire debris flows is critical for mitigating hazards to communities, infrastructure, and resources during intense rainfall in recently burned areas. However, identifying reliable machine learning models is complicated by overlapping debris-flow and non-debris-flow events in feature space, the need for model interpretability, and limited training data. This paper addresses these challenges through a systematic evaluation of machine learning models in terms of predictive performance, feature importance, and synthetic data augmentation. Using basin-scale observations of post-wildfire debris-flow events across the western United States, we compare 15 models, including the Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Network (TabPFN). Repeated stratified cross-validation shows that TabPFN achieves the highest unaugmented performance with a threat score of 0.637, closely followed by the best tree-based models. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) are used to identify the features driving predictions, revealing that short-duration rainfall intensity and storm accumulation consistently rank highest, while burn severity and terrain features contribute less. We further evaluate synthetic data augmentation using TabPFN-generated samples to address the scarcity of debris-flow observations. Synthetic augmentation improves the performance of all models except CNN, with the largest mean threat score increase of +0.041 among the deep learning models. By combining rigorous model benchmarking, interpretable feature analysis, and synthetic data augmentation, this work provides a comprehensive framework for improving post-wildfire debris-flow prediction.

In this work, we present a wildfire temperature retrieval framework for VSWIR imaging spectroscopy data, employed on data from NASA's Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-3). The retrieval framework utilizes a full-physics approach in which a forward model is employed to resolve both solar and emitted radiance derived from a temperature distribution and utilizes the full spectral range in the residual fit. To optimize the forward model retrieval, we use state-of-the-art nonlinear least squares methods implemented for fast convergence on the on-board GPU, allowing for estimation of effective fire temperature within flight cadence. We verify the forward model assumptions on simulated spectra with an injected thermal signature and find good agreement with an RMSE of $41.8$ Kelvin (K). We apply the retrieval over the full 2025 FireSense AVIRIS-3 campaign, totaling 168 overflights with probable active fire spectra, and demonstrate a residual radiance fit of $\leq 10\%$ across bands in the short-wave infrared (SWIR). Lastly, we verify the applicability of the retrieved posterior fire temperature parameters to generalize to space-borne imaging spectrometers such as EMIT, by retrieving at coarsened spatial resolution. We find that the posterior distribution exhibits good coverage of the underlying sub-pixel temperature range with an absolute error of $30$ K across quantiles and a mean absolute error of $27.16$ K between spatial resolutions.

The development of vision-based wildfire detection systems for unmanned aerial vehicles is constrained by the limited availability of diverse real-world training images. This paper investigates the impact of dataset composition on embedded real-time UAV wildfire detection using compact YOLO models as a controlled validation family. Four training configurations were evaluated: real non-augmented, real augmented, hybrid non-augmented, and hybrid augmented, where the hybrid sets combine real wildfire images with AI-generated samples. The objective is to determine whether synthetic data mixing and image augmentation improve practical detection performance under resource-constrained deployment conditions. Experimental results show that the best overall operating point was obtained with the real non-augmented dataset, which achieved the strongest balance between recall and mean average precision for UAV-based wildfire detection. The results also show that neither hybridization with synthetic data nor augmentation produced a better final deployment choice. These findings suggest that, for embedded UAV wildfire detection, dataset realism and domain alignment are more valuable than increasing training set size through synthetic expansion.

A quantum-inspired tensor network framework for wildfire susceptibility classification in the Gargano region is introduced, leveraging AlphaEarth embeddings and Matrix Product State models. The approach combines scalable geospatial representations with an interpretable quantum mask, enabling both binary and multiclass classification of wildfire susceptibility. Beyond predictive performance, the study reveals a pronounced grokking transition in the binary case and provides a detailed analysis of inter-class confusion in the multiclass setting. By introducing level-resolved mixedness diagnostics based on reduced density matrices, we show that the MPS classifier naturally encodes a hierarchy of class distinguishability, with non-adjacent categories becoming more separable than neighboring ones. These results demonstrate that tensor network models not only achieve competitive classification accuracy but also offer a physically grounded framework to quantify and interpret class separability in complex environmental datasets.

Over the past decades, the frequency of global wildfires has been increasing steadily. Therefore, if the fire can be detected and precisely located at an early stage, the potential hazards caused by it can be minimized to the greatest extent. The machine learning methods based on satellite images, due to their ability to automatically monitor extremely remote and vast areas, have shown great potential for application in the field of wildfire detection. To address this challenge, we proposed a new model named spectral-morphological attention U-Net(SMA-UNet), which includes a spectral attention module, a residual attention UNet backbone, a channel-spatial modulator, and a pair of differentiable morphological gates. We trained and evaluated this model with two datasets. These modules, excluding the backbone, are used to detect active fire events for the first time, especially the pair of differentiable morphological gates, which is innovatively developed. The proposed model achieved the highest scores in both datasets (e.g., intersection over union 75.16% in TS-SatFire, 22.50% in Sen2Fire). By conducting ablation studies of each module, we compared their independent contributions and tested their combinations. Ultimately, the integration of these modules yields a highly robust framework that significantly improves segmentation consistency across diverse and complex environmental conditions. Future work will focus on validating the proposed architecture across large-scale, multi-regional datasets from different satellite sensors to establish its broader generalizability for global wildfire detection.

Accurate 3D terrain maps are essential for emergency response when assessing wildfire hazards. However, wildfire-prone regions often span vast areas where conventional reconstruction methods underperform. Airborne LiDAR systems provide high-resolution terrain data, but they are expensive and infrequently updated. Image-based methods offer a lower-cost alternative, but struggle due to sparse visual features and limited image overlap. We propose a multi-modal reconstruction framework leveraging outdated Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) as geometric priors for image-based 3D reconstruction. Our key innovation is physics-based pixel-pixel alignment between images and DEM data, dramatically reducing computational complexity by eliminating expensive feature matching procedures. To validate our approach, we developed a large-terrain simulator based on a real wildfire-prone area, generating realistic images enabling a comprehensive evaluation. Given posed images and legacy DEMs, our method produces high-fidelity depth maps while maintaining real-time performance. We find significant improvements in reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency over existing techniques, offering a scalable solution for wildfire response.

Wildfire smoke events produce extreme PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations that pose severe public health risks, yet forecasting rare, hazardous-level spikes remains a fundamental challenge. Time series foundation models (TSFMs), pretrained models offering zero-shot inference and efficient adaptation, perform strongly on general benchmarks, but their behavior under extreme out-of-distribution conditions is poorly understood. We present the first systematic benchmark comparing six TSFM configurations (zero-shot TimesFM, Chronos-2, Moirai-2, and Time-MoE, plus LoRA fine-tuned Chronos-2 and Time-MoE) against fully-trained baselines (LSTM, BiLSTM, Transformer) and naive persistence on a 12-year (2013--2025) hourly PM$_{2.5}$ dataset covering 1,375 wildfire incidents across 79 California monitoring sites. A leave-one-incident-out (LOIO) protocol evaluates generalization to unseen fires, using MAE, RMSE, and exceedance F1 at EPA AQI thresholds across 6-, 12-, and 24-hour horizons. Results reveal a consistent hierarchy. The BiLSTM achieves the lowest MAE ($5.16\,μg/m^3$) and the highest exceedance F1 at every threshold, including the Hazardous band ($>225.5\,μg/m^3$), reaching 0.63 versus at most 0.54 for any foundation model. Zero-shot TSFMs improve on persistence only modestly, and zero-shot Chronos-2 exhibits severe RMSE tail instability ($23.4\,μg/m^3$, negative $R^2$) from sporadic large errors. LoRA fine-tuning substantially improves both adapted families and largely repairs this instability, yet no foundation model surpasses the trained recurrent baselines on any metric. These findings challenge the assumption that larger pretrained models universally dominate environmental forecasting and provide actionable deployment guidance for wildfire air quality prediction.

We describe the 2026 Methods for Open Agent Systems Evaluation Initiative (MOASEI) Competition, a benchmark event for evaluating multi-agent decision-making under open-system conditions. Building on the inaugural 2025 competition, the 2026 edition retained wildfire fighting, cybersecurity, and ride-sharing domains while adding a bonus wildfire track with frame openness, in which agent equipment states such as suppressant capacities and firefighting range vary over time. The competition also expanded its reporting metrics to emphasize total task completions, mean task-completion time, and mean value of completed tasks. Participation in 2026 was limited: eight teams registered, but only one team submitted a final entry, and that entry targeted the ride-sharing track. The submitted DLC approach used planning and replanning to solve routing problems across agents as passengers appeared. This report summarizes the 2026 competition design, highlights differences from the previous year, and reports ride-sharing evaluation results against baseline policies. DLC is recognized as the 2026 ride-sharing track winner among submitted teams.

Wildfire monitoring from UAVs requires reliable reasoning over complex aerial scenes, where smoke, scale variation, and occlusions often limit RGB-only interpretation. We introduce FlameVQA, a multiple-choice visual question answering benchmark for UAV-based wildfire intelligence built on FLAME 3, leveraging paired RGB imagery and radiometric thermal TIFFs for temperature-grounded, safety-critical reasoning. FlameVQA includes 34 multiple-choice questions per image spanning six operational capability groups, covering tasks such as detection, localization, distribution/coverage estimation, cross-modal reasoning, and flight planning. To ensure label reliability, we combine MLLM-assisted annotation with deterministic thermal rules and cross-question consistency checks, followed by human auditing. We also evaluate representative MLLMs on FlameVQA to provide baselines for future work. Results show strong performance when explicit cross-modal cues are available, but notable failures on presence detection under heavy smoke and on coverage estimation. These findings suggest that current MLLMs require domain-specific adaptation to better support disaster and wildfire monitoring. The dataset and benchmark code are open-source at github.com/mobiiin/WildFire_VQA

Virtual training environments are software-intensive systems in which reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn, adapt, and demonstrate meaningful behavior. Virtual training environments offer a safe and cost-efficient alternative to training agents in real-world settings. However, to converge, most realistic RL problems require training in multiple, mostly similar but slightly different environments - i.e., families of environment variants. The typical development process of environment families is a labor-intensive and error-prone manual endeavor that does not scale well. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for developing families of RL training environments. To obtain the family of environments, we develop an approach and prototype tool. In our approach, a hybrid genetic algorithm - a combination of population-based global search and heuristic local search - generates environment families. Mutations and constraints are expressed as model transformations and are operationalized into a search process by a state-of-the-art model transformation engine. We demonstrate the soundness of our approach in a wildfire mitigation scenario and curriculum learning - a particular learning paradigm that relies on environment families.

Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes. Wall-to-wall, annually updated maps are a persistent need for effective forest management. Many planning systems and data collections combine disparate data sources with different purposes, vintages, and prediction quality, which leads to confounding behavior in operational planning systems. We introduce the VibrantForests framework, developed and applied to map forest attributes and provide a coherent foundation for effective forest and wildfire planning. VibrantForests includes a satellite-based forest structure model trained on lidar-derived samples and applied across the contiguous United States to concurrently generate estimates of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground live tree biomass, basal area, and quadratic mean diameter at 10-meter resolution. We demonstrate predictive capability spanning the full spectrum of forest conditions ranging from sparse-canopy/low-biomass to dense-canopy/high-biomass. Results show that our model extends the range at which saturation is commonly encountered in comparable passive-sensor models, and reduces regression-to-mean behavior that commonly produces overestimation of forest attributes in small/sparse conditions and underestimation in large/dense conditions. The VibrantForests framework addresses a key limitation in large-area forest and wildfire planning by delivering coherent wall-to-wall estimates of management-relevant attributes at annual cadence and 10m resolution.

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.

Background: Wildfires in Canada present increasing threats to ecosystems, communities, and infrastructure, demanding accurate forecasting tools to aid mitigation efforts. Existing models often lack scalability or fail to capture temporal dynamics effectively. Aims: This study aims to develop a deep learning framework tailored to Canadian wildfire spread prediction that captures spatio-temporal patterns in environmental data. Methods: We propose a U-Net architecture integrating a Video Swin Transformer encoder with a convolutional decoder to model three-day sequences of meteorological and environmental variables. Data are exclusively sourced from public repositories via Google Earth Engine, ensuring transparency and scalability. The model is trained and tested on a curated dataset of major Canadian wildfire events from 2014 to 2023. Key results: Our approach achieves strong predictive performance by effectively leveraging spatio-temporal attention to forecast next-day fire incidence maps. Conclusions: The model successfully captures complex wildfire dynamics unique to Canada's landscape and temporal variability. Implications: This framework paves the way for advanced spatio-temporal wildfire forecasting research and operational applications using publicly accessible datasets.

We propose ShearFuse-UNet, a lightweight and computationally efficient deep learning model for next-day wildfire spread prediction from multi-modal satellite data. The model integrates three complementary transform-domain branches inside each encoder block of a U-Net backbone: a 2D Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) branch, a 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) branch, and a cone-adapted digital Shearlet residual branch. The WHT and DCT branches establish orthogonal latent spaces with learnable spectral scaling and fixed soft-thresholding, while the Shearlet branch provides anisotropic, multi-directional feature decomposition that explicitly encodes the elongated edge structures characteristic of fire fronts. A learned SpectralFusion gate adaptively combines the WHT and DCT responses, and the Shearlet reconstruction is added as a residual. This three-branch design bears a loose structural analogy to transformer self-attention: the WHT and DCT branches provide complementary spectral representations that are adaptively fused, while the Shearlet branch contributes directional content through a residual pathway. Unlike self-attention, the proposed design relies on fixed mathematical transforms rather than learned projection operators, reducing parameter count and computational cost. Evaluated on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, ShearFuse-UNet achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a ResNet18-based U-Net (14M parameters, F1 = 0.589) and demonstrating a highly favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Results on the Google Next-Day Wildfire Spread dataset further validate these findings across a different benchmark.

Aerial wildfire suppression requires not only predicting fire spread, but also designing effective intervention strategies under operational and environmental uncertainty. We present a modeling and optimization framework for aerial wildfire suppression that combines a hybrid neural-cellular automaton wildfire model with gradient-based design of targeted aerial drops. The wildfire model predicts spatially varying spread behavior from terrain, fuel, and wind data, while the intervention module determines binary drop actions with continuous-valued location and orientation parameters mapped to the simulation grid. Water and retardant are represented with distinct suppression effects, corresponding to immediate reduction of active burning and persistent reduction of future spread. To evaluate the robustness of the resulting suppression plans, we quantify both aleatoric uncertainty through Monte Carlo sampling of daily fire-state realizations and epistemic uncertainty through spatially correlated prediction-error perturbations. A case study based on the 2020 Bear Fire shows that the framework can generate coherent aerial suppression schedules for reducing total fire-affected area and can support uncertainty-aware analysis of wildfire intervention strategies.

Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.

Wildfire detection and monitoring are critical for mitigating fire spread and reducing environmental and infrastructural damage. In this work, we introduce GWFP (Global Wildfire Prevention Dataset), a large-scale, open-source dataset of wildfire images and videos designed to support early fire and smoke detection research. GWFP contains geographically diverse wildfire scenes, including flames, smoke, Waterdog/Fog environmental conditions, Near Infrared (NIR) imagery, Ember, and challenging negative samples collected from real-world scenarios worldwide. To evaluate dataset robustness and cross-domain generalization, we benchmark multiple convolutional and transformer-based architectures across both in-domain and cross-dataset settings. Additionally, we explore lightweight frequency--spatial feature interaction using Hadamard-enhanced residual connections (HTE-ResNet) to analyze representation robustness under domain-shift conditions. Experimental results demonstrate strong cross-dataset generalization and practical utility for real-world wildfire monitoring applications. The dataset and source code will be publicly released upon acceptance.

We present our ongoing work on the veriFIRE project: a collaboration between industry and academia, aimed at applying verification to increase the reliability of a real-world, safety-critical system. Specifically, we target an airborne platform for wildfire detection, which incorporates two deep neural networks. We present an end-to-end methodology for verifying \textit{consistency properties} in this system. Our approach encodes application-grounded requirements into solver-compatible queries for existing neural network verifiers. We study properties of interest over critical operational scenarios: (i) monotonicity of detector confidence as target intensity increases; and (ii) bounded detector response under physically plausible blur over the sensor. We instantiate these encodings using state-of-the-art neural network verification backends and evaluate them at scale on real background samples. For the first property, all verification queries are solved in under five minutes. For the second property, verification is substantially harder, highlighting key scalability challenges for richer, higher-dimensional specifications. Overall, the results demonstrate that meaningful, domain-specific guarantees can be obtained for industrial systems.

Wildfire prediction is important for early warning and resource allocation, yet existing Earth foundation models (Earth FMs) are pretrained for general atmospheric and geophysical objectives rather than wildfire forecasting. To address this gap, we introduce WILDFIRE-FM, the first foundation model pretrained specifically for wildfire prediction using weather, active-fire observations, topography, vegetation, and static environmental data. However, introducing a domain-specific backbone alone does not solve the evaluation problem: wildfire events are sparse in space and time, making transfer conclusions highly sensitive to matching rules and evaluation settings. To address this problem, we introduce a fixed-contract evaluation framework with two controlled checks: a fixed-output check for matching-rule effects and a fixed-feature check for head-selection effects. Under matched contracts, we compare WILDFIRE-FM with ten Earth-FM baselines across occupancy, spread, retrieval, and regression tasks. Our results show that wildfire transfer conclusions depend strongly on evaluation design and task formulation. We hope this framework and WILDFIRE-FM provide a foundation for future wildfire-specific Earth-FM research and benchmarking. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Wildfire-fm-evaluation-contracts-5AE9/.

Predicting rare extreme events such as wildfires from meteorological data requires models that remain reliable under evolving environmental conditions. This problem is inherently long-tailed: wildfire events are rare but high-impact, while most observations correspond to non-fire conditions, causing standard learning objectives to underemphasize the minority class (fire) that matters most. In addition, models trained on historical distributions often fail under distribution shifts, exhibiting degraded performance in new environments. To this end, we propose Environment-Adaptive Preference Optimization (EAPO), a framework that adapts prediction to the target environment with long-tail distribution. Given a new input distribution, we first construct distribution-aligned datasets via $k$-nearest neighbor retrieval. We then perform a hybrid fine-tuning procedure on this local manifold, combining supervised learning with preference optimization, as well as emphasizing on rare extreme events. EAPO refines decision boundaries while avoiding conflicting signals from heterogeneous training data. We evaluate EAPO on a real-world wildfire prediction task with environmental shifts. EAPO achieves robust performance (ROC-AUC 0.7310) and improves detection in extreme regimes, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic wildfire prediction systems.

Accurate next-day active fire forecasts can support early warning, disaster response, forest risk assessment, and downstream estimation of fire-related carbon emissions. Existing machine learning approaches to wildfire forecasting typically predict wildfire danger or fire probability on kilometre-scale daily grids, which is useful for regional warning but does not directly represent localized fire events. We propose Wildfire Ignition Set Predictor (WISP), a query-based model that reformulates next-day active fire forecasting as point-set prediction. From 48 hours of covariates including meteorology, satellite vegetation products, static land, and fire history, WISP predicts a fixed-size ranked set of future active fire cluster centres on a 375 m grid across globally distributed regions. The model is trained end-to-end with Hungarian matching; to address the conflicting roles of the classification score in assignment, ranking, and query activation, we use asymmetric classification-localization weighting in matching and loss. We further construct a globally distributed, hourly, multi-source benchmark for this task. On a held-out test set spanning fire regions worldwide, the best WISP variant achieves 38.2% average precision (AP) for ranked fire-centre detections, covers 53.4% of fire cluster mass weighted by fire radiative power (FRP), and localizes 54.1% of observed clusters within 5 km. These results establish sparse set prediction as a viable formulation for high-resolution wildfire forecasting and provide a benchmark for future work in this regime.

We present a deployed system for on-orbit wildfire detection aboard a nine-satellite commercial thermal infrared constellation, operating under demanding joint constraints: sub-megabyte model footprint, sub-150 ms per-batch TensorRT FP16 inference on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, and an end-to-end alert pipeline targeting under 10 minutes from satellite overpass to fire event communication. The system operates on uncalibrated mid-wave infrared (MWIR) single-band imagery at 200 m ground sampling distance, where fires frequently appear as sub-pixel or single-pixel thermal anomalies under extreme class imbalance -- challenges not addressed by the contextual thermal-thresholding pipelines (MODIS, VIIRS) that currently dominate operational fire monitoring. We present an empirical study of lightweight dense representation learning for this regime using a proprietary nine-satellite MWIR dataset. We compare dense masked autoencoding (DenseMAE) and a hybrid DenseMAE+EMA (exponential moving average) distillation variant, and evaluate representations via linear probing and full-distribution pixel-level average precision (AP) under extreme class imbalance. DenseMAE pretraining enables compact downstream models on the latency-accuracy Pareto frontier: our fastest SSL-pretrained model achieves 0.640 test AP and 0.69 event-level Fire-F1 with 65.34 ms latency per batch and a 0.52 MB engine, without pruning or compression. The best configuration reaches 0.699 AP and 0.744 Fire-F1 below 1 MB, outperforming a supervised baseline (0.650 AP) under comparable constraints.

Intense wildfire seasons require critical prioritization decisions to allocate scarce suppression resources over a dispersed geographical area. This paper develops a predictive and prescriptive approach to jointly optimize crew assignments and wildfire suppression. The problem features a discrete resource-allocation structure with endogenous wildfire demand and non-linear wildfire dynamics. We formulate an integer optimization model with crew assignments on a time-space-rest network, wildfire dynamics on a time-state network, and linking constraints between them. We develop a two-sided branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm based on: (i) a two-sided column generation scheme that generates fire suppression plans and crew routes iteratively; (ii) a new family of cuts exploiting the knapsack structure of the linking constraints; and (iii) novel branching rules to accommodate non-linear wildfire dynamics. We also propose a data-driven double machine learning approach to estimate wildfire spread as a function of covariate information and suppression efforts, mitigating observed confounding between historical crew assignments and wildfire growth. Extensive computational experiments show that the optimization algorithm scales to otherwise intractable real-world instances; and that the methodology can enhance suppression effectiveness in practice, resulting in significant reductions in area burned over a wildfire season and guiding resource sharing across wildfire jurisdictions.

Wildfires are a major producer of fine particulate matter, impacting human health and the electrical grid. Accurately forecasting smoke impacts over long time scales incorporates fuel treatment strategies, natural fuel succession, and stochastic events like lightning strikes. However, predicting smoke for each fuel distribution with a forward simulation of a coupled fire-atmosphere model is computationally infeasible. Moreover, relatively simple fire models are tractable to run in many long-time scenarios but do not capture smoke transport. We use data-driven multilinear operators to predict a smoke concentration field from knowledge of the time since ignition for two quantities of interest: aerosol optical depth and smoke detection. Our method first computes the principal components of time-since-ignition and smoke concentration fields and then learns a map from powers of the input coefficients to the output coefficients. We apply our learned operator to smoke prediction in the Upper Rio Grande Watershed. After collecting training data, learning the approximation weights on a CPU takes less than 30 seconds, and each forward call takes less than 1 ms. On a proxy for aerosol optical depth, we obtain equal accuracy to Monte Carlo sampling with fewer than half as many coupled model calls. For smoke detection, we obtain an intersection-over-union (IoU) of 0.64 and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.95 on holdout data. Our method is significantly more accurate than the most similar published smoke classifier, which obtains an IoU and AUC of 0.15 and 0.61, respectively, on a 2015 bushfire in Australia.

Reliable wildfire spread prediction is vital for risk-aware emergency planning, yet most deep learning models lack principled uncertainty quantification (UQ). Further, for boundary-sensitive cases like wildfire spread, evaluating models with global metrics alone is often insufficient. To shift the focus of UQ evaluation toward a more operationally relevant approach, the Fire-Centered Evaluation Region (FCER) framework is introduced as a spatially conditioned protocol to characterize UQ within critical fire zones. Using FCER, an Ensemble is compared against an distilled single-pass student model on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset. The student model demonstrates comparable calibration and complementary uncertainty ranking in boundary-relevant regimes. Code is available at https://github.com/jonasvilhofunk/WildfireUQ-FCER

Wildfire monitoring requires timely, actionable situational awareness from airborne platforms, yet existing aerial visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks do not evaluate wildfire-specific multimodal reasoning grounded in thermal measurements. We introduce WildFireVQA, a large-scale VQA benchmark for aerial wildfire monitoring that integrates RGB imagery with radiometric thermal data. WildFireVQA contains 6,097 RGB-thermal samples, where each sample includes an RGB image, a color-mapped thermal visualization, and a radiometric thermal TIFF, and is paired with 34 questions, yielding a total of 207,298 multiple-choice questions spanning presence and detection, classification, distribution and segmentation, localization and direction, cross-modal reasoning, and flight planning for operational wildfire intelligence. To improve annotation reliability, we combine multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based answer generation with sensor-driven deterministic labeling, manual verification, and intra-frame and inter-frame consistency checks. We further establish a comprehensive evaluation protocol for representative MLLMs under RGB, Thermal, and retrieval-augmented settings using radiometric thermal statistics. Experiments show that across task categories, RGB remains the strongest modality for current models, while retrieved thermal context yields gains for stronger MLLMs, highlighting both the value of temperature-grounded reasoning and the limitations of existing MLLMs in safety-critical wildfire scenarios. The dataset and benchmark code are open-source at https://github.com/mobiiin/WildFire_VQA.

Machine learning-based wildfire detection has advanced significantly using deep learning models trained on large wildfire image and video datasets. However, peatland fires exhibit distinct characteristics, including smoldering combustion, low flame intensity, persistent smoke, and subsurface burning, limiting the effectiveness of conventional wildfire detectors. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient deep learning framework for peatland fire detection based on a Walsh--Hadamard Transform enhanced ResNet-50 (WHT-ResNet-50), which improves feature representation while reducing model complexity. To enable efficient deployment, the training-time architecture is structurally reparameterized into an equivalent inference model without sacrificing detection performance. Furthermore, the proposed framework leverages wildfire-to-peatland domain adaptation through transfer learning and introduces a mixed-domain training strategy that produces a unified detector capable of recognizing both wildfire and peatland fire events. Experimental results demonstrate that transfer learning substantially improves peatland fire detection under limited-data conditions, while the proposed WHT-ResNet-50 achieves higher accuracy and F1-score than conventional architectures with fewer parameters. The structurally reparameterized model further reduces inference cost while preserving detection accuracy. Video-based evaluation demonstrates robust performance with low false alarm rates, achieving a 100% event detection rate across all positive test videos. Overall, the proposed framework provides an accurate, efficient, and practical solution for early peatland fire detection.

To mitigate acute wildfire ignition risks, utilities de-energize power lines in high-risk areas. The Optimal Power Shutoff (OPS) problem optimizes line energization statuses to manage wildfire ignition risks through de-energizations while reducing load shedding. OPS problems are computationally challenging Mixed-Integer Linear Programs (MILPs) that must be solved rapidly and frequently in operational settings. For a particular power system, OPS instances share a common structure with varying parameters related to wildfire risks, loads, and renewable generation. This motivates the use of Machine Learning (ML) for solving OPS problems by exploiting shared patterns across instances. In this paper, we develop an ML-guided framework that quickly produces high-quality de-energization decisions by extending existing ML-guided MILP solution methods while integrating domain knowledge on the number of energized and de-energized lines. Results on a large-scale realistic California-based synthetic test system show that the proposed ML-guided method produces high-quality solutions faster than traditional optimization methods.

Canada experienced in 2023 one of the most severe wildfire seasons in recent history, causing damage across ecosystems, destroying communities, and emitting large quantities of CO2. This extreme wildfire season is symptomatic of a climate-change-induced increase in the length and severity of the fire season that affects the boreal ecosystem. Therefore, it is critical to empower wildfire management in boreal communities with better mitigation solutions. Wildfire probability maps represent an important tool for understanding the likelihood of wildfire occurrence and the potential severity of future wildfires. The massive increase in the availability of Earth observation data has enabled the development of deep learning-based wildfire forecasting models, aiming at providing precise wildfire probability maps at different spatial and temporal scales. A main limitation of such methods is their reliance on coarse-resolution environmental drivers and satellite products, leading to wildfire occurrence prediction of reduced resolution, typically around $\sim 0.1$°. This paper presents a benchmark dataset: CanadaFireSat, and baseline methods for high-resolution: 100 m wildfire forecasting across Canada, leveraging multi-modal data from high-resolution multi-spectral satellite images (Sentinel-2 L1C), mid-resolution satellite products (MODIS), and environmental factors (ERA5 reanalysis data). Our experiments consider two major deep learning architectures. We observe that using multi-modal temporal inputs outperforms single-modal temporal inputs across all metrics, achieving a peak performance of 60.3% in F1 score for the 2023 wildfire season, a season never seen during model training. This demonstrates the potential of multi-modal deep learning models for wildfire forecasting at high-resolution and continental scale.

The increasing accessibility of radiometric thermal imaging sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential for advancing AI-driven aerial wildfire management. Radiometric imaging provides per-pixel temperature estimates, a valuable improvement over non-radiometric data that requires irradiance measurements to be converted into visible images using RGB color palettes. Despite its benefits, this technology has been underutilized largely due to a lack of available data for researchers. This study addresses this gap by introducing methods for collecting and processing synchronized visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery using UAVs at prescribed fires. The included imagery processing pipeline drastically simplifies and partially automates each step from data collection to neural network input. Further, we present the FLAME 3 dataset, the first comprehensive collection of side-by-side visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery of wildland fires. Building on our previous FLAME 1 and FLAME 2 datasets, FLAME 3 includes radiometric thermal Tag Image File Format (TIFFs) and nadir thermal plots, providing a new data type and collection method. This dataset aims to spur a new generation of machine learning models utilizing radiometric thermal imagery, potentially trivializing tasks such as aerial wildfire detection, segmentation, and assessment. A single-burn subset of FLAME 3 for computer vision applications is available on Kaggle with the full 6 burn set available to readers upon request.