Forest Fire Prediction and Control

The lab's ongoing research cover a range of problems in decision making and prediction for Forest Management. This includes algorithms for :

  • optimization of sustainable harvest policies under spatial constraints using Reinforcement Learning and Policy Gradient Search.
  • learning dynamics of forest fire spread from simulations and satellite data using Deep Reinforcement Learning
  • generation of future fire spread scenarios from image series using Long-Term Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks 
  • modelling of decision making about treatment against forest wildfires using Markov decision processes

 

See also: Deep Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, Forest Fires, Prediction, Classification, Forest Fire Prediction and Control, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
mltree.pdf
papers2.pdf
papers1.pdf
Final Published Version
Artificial intelligence has been applied in wildfire science and management since the 1990s, with early applications including neural networks and expert systems. Since then the field has rapidly progressed congruently with the wide adoption of machine learning (ML) methods in the environmental sciences. Here, we present a scoping review of ML applications in wildfire science and management. Our overall objective is to improve awareness of ML methods among wildfire researchers and managers, as well as illustrate the diverse and challenging range of problems in wildfire science available to ML data scientists. To that end, we first present an overview of popular ML approaches used in wildfire science to date, and then review the use of ML in wildfire science as broadly categorized into six problem domains, including: 1) fuels characterization, fire detection, and mapping; 2) fire weather and climate change; 3) fire occurrence, susceptibility, and risk; 4) fire behavior prediction; 5) fire effects; and 6) fire management. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and limitations of various ML approaches relating to data size, computational requirements, generalizability, and interpretability, as well as identify opportunities for future advances in the science and management of wildfires within a data science context. In total, we identfied 300 relevant publications up to the end of 2019, where the most frequently used ML methods across problem domains included random forests, MaxEnt, artificial neural networks, decision trees, support vector machines, and genetic algorithms. As such, there exists opportunities to apply more current ML methods — including deep learning and agent based learning — in the wildfire sciences, especially in instances involving very large multivariate datasets. We must recognize, however, that despite the ability of ML methods to learn on their own, expertise in wildfire science is necessary to ensure realistic modelling of fire processes across multiple scales, while the complexity of some ML methods, such as deep learning, requires a dedicated and sophisticated knowledge of their application. Finally, we stress that the wildfire research and management communities play an active role in providing relevant, high quality, and freely available wildfire data for use by practitioners of ML methods.
Results of fire spread prediction from different ML algorithms
See also: Computational Sustainability, Forest Fires, Forest Fire Prediction and Control, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
Machine learning algorithms have increased tremendously in power in recent years but have yet to be fully utilized in many ecology and sustainable resource management domains such as wildlife reserve design, forest fire management and invasive species spread. One thing these domains have in common is that they contain dynamics that can be characterized as a Spatially Spreading Process (SSP) which requires many parameters to be set precisely to model the dynamics, spread rates and directional biases of the elements which are spreading. We present related work in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for SSP sustainability domains including forest wildfire prediction. We then introduce a novel approach for learning in SSP domains using Reinforcement Learning (RL) where fire is the agent at any cell in the landscape and the set of actions the fire can take from a location at any point in time includes spreading North, South, East, West or not spreading. This approach inverts the usual RL setup since the dynamics of the corresponding Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a known function for immediate wildfire spread. Meanwhile, we learn an agent policy for a predictive model of the dynamics of a complex spatially-spreading process. Rewards are provided for correctly classifying which cells are on fire or not compared to satellite and other related data. We examine the behaviour of five RL algorithms on this problem: Value Iteration, Policy Iteration, Q-Learning, Monte Carlo Tree Search and Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C). We compare to a Gaussian process based supervised learning approach and discuss the relation of our approach to manually constructed, state-of-the-art methods from forest wildfire modelling. We also discuss the relation of our approach to manually constructed, state-of-the-art methods from forest wildfire modelling. We validate our approach with satellite image data of two massive wildfire events in Northern Alberta, Canada; the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 and the Richardson fire of 2011. The results show that we can learn predictive, agent-based policies as models of spatial dynamics using RL on readily available satellite images that other methods and have many additional advantages in terms of generalizability and interpretability.
Combining MCTS and A3C for Prediction of Spatially Spreading Processes in Forest Wildfire Settings
Subramanian, S.G. & Crowley, M., 2018. Combining MCTS and A3C for Prediction of Spatially Spreading Processes in Forest Wildfire Settings. In Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Springer, pp. 285-291. Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-89656-4_28. Publisher's Version
See also: Computational Sustainability, Forest Fires, Forest Fire Prediction and Control
Abstract
Canadian_AI_forestfire_2.pdf

 In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown super-human performance in a variety Atari and classic board games like chess and GO. Research into applications of RL in other domains with spatial considerations like environmental planning are still in their nascent stages. In this paper, we introduce a novel combination of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and A3C algorithms on an online simulator of a wildfire, on a pair of forest fires in Northern Alberta (Fort McMurray and Richardson fires) and on historical Saskatchewan fires previously compared by others to a physics-based simulator. We conduct several experiments to predict fire spread for several days before and after the given spatial information of fire spread and ignition points. Our results show that the advancements in Deep RL applications in the gaming world have advantages in spatially spreading real-world problems like forest fires. 

Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian (graduated)

PhD, University of Waterloo, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
MASc University of Waterloo
BEng Geomatics, College of Engineering Guindy, Anna Univeristy
Research Website
LinkedIn

Sriram's research in the lab focussed on the use of Machine Learning to understand and simulate spatially spreading processes like forest fires by...

Read more about Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian (graduated)
See also: Forest Fire Prediction and Control, Multi-Agent RL
See also: Reinforcement Learning, Forest Fire Prediction and Control
Abstract

Spatiotemporal planning involves making choices at multiple locations in space over some planning horizon to maximize utility and satisfy various constraints. In Forest Ecosystem Management, the problem is to choose actions for thousands of locations each year including harvesting, treating trees for fire or pests, or doing nothing. The utility models could place value on sale of lumber, ecosystem sustainability or employment levels and incorporate legal and logistical constraints on actions such as avoiding large contiguous areas of clearcutting. Simulators developed by forestry researchers provide detailed dynamics but are generally inaccesible black boxes. We model spatiotemporal planning as a factored Markov decision process and present a policy gradient planning algorithm to optimize a stochastic spatial policy using simulated dynamics. It is common in environmental and resource planning to have actions at different locations be spatially interelated; this makes representation and planning challenging. We define a global spatial policy in terms of interacting local policies defining distributions over actions at each location conditioned on actions at nearby locations. Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation is used to sample landscape policies and estimate their gradients. Evaluation is carried out on a forestry planning problem with 1,880 locations using a variety of value models and constraints. Index

Houtman, R.M. et al., 2013. Allowing a wildfire to burn: Estimating the effect on future fire suppression costs. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 22(7), pp.871–882.
See also: Computational Sustainability, Forest Fires, Forest Fire Prediction and Control, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
Where a legacy of aggressive wildland fire suppression has left forests in need of fuel reduction, allowing wildland fire to burn may provide fuel treatment benefits, thereby reducing suppression costs from subsequent fires. The least-cost-plus-net-value-change model of wildland fire economics includes benefits of wildfire in a framework for evaluating suppression options. In this study, we estimated one component of that benefit – the expected present value of the reduction in suppression costs for subsequent fires arising from the fuel treatment effect of a current fire. To that end, we employed Monte Carlo methods to generate a set of scenarios for subsequent fire ignition and weather events, which are referred to as sample paths, for a study area in central Oregon. We simulated fire on the landscape over a 100-year time horizon using existing models of fire behaviour, vegetation and fuels development, and suppression effectiveness, and we estimated suppression costs using an existing suppression cost model. Our estimates suggest that the potential cost savings may be substantial. Further research is needed to estimate the full least-cost-plus-net-value-change model. This line of research will extend the set of tools available for developing wildfire management plans for forested landscapes.