About the project

The core objective of FireCycle is to develop, implement and integrate empirical and stochastic methods to assess exposure to wildfires at the landscape level. This entails the following specific objectives:

  1. Characterize natural and human-caused ignition probability. This objective seeks to outline the footprint of ignitions, setting the baseline to feed the simulation algorithms that will grow theoretical fires based on an accurate depiction of fire ignition.
  2. Model the likelihood of fires escaping suppression efforts. Characterizing the ignition patterns does not suffice to attain a realistic pattern of fire occurrence. To focus on those fire events holding the potential to become large and extreme events the capability of containing fire must be accounted for. This objective adds an additional filter layer to reshape the footprint of ignition likelihood into the probability of extreme fire ignitions, i.e., fires escaping control and possibly becoming large fire events.
  3. Simulate wildfire spread potential to characterize fire behavior. This is the core of the proposal. Growing simulated fires under a wide array of climate conditions and scenarios will unravel the actual pattern of burn probability. That is, the likelihood that a fire propagates through a given location and the behavior that it displays (e.g., burn intensity or rate of spread).
  4. Provide insights into the level of exposure of human and natural resources. The ultimate goal is to determine to which extent valuable assets can be affected by fires. Overlying burn probability (and fire behavior) we can outline the chances of a given asset (e.g., buildings, roads or ecosystems’ services) to be affected by fire.

Grant CNS2023-144228 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and by the “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”. funding