WildfireSpreadBench evaluates machine‑learning models for predicting next‑day wildfire spread, comparing five discriminative and one generative architecture on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset. The study shows that model rankings differ markedly when using Average Precision versus threshold‑dependent metrics such as F1 and IoU, revealing three distinct prediction profiles—over‑predicting, balanced, and under‑predicting—that AP alone cannot distinguish. Expanding input channels modestly affected AP, underscoring that AP may favor models with predictions poorly suited for operational use.
By Arin Gopakumar, Marco Pannozzo
The paper presents a spatiotemporal graph neural network that predicts global fire radiative power (FRP) up to seven days ahead using recent observations and reanalysis data. Trained on 2020‑2022 data and evaluated for 2023‑2024, the model reproduces the seasonal FRP cycle and outperforms persistence, reducing mean squared error by 32–43% at one‑day lead and 24–40% at seven days at 0.1° resolution. While large fires are reliably detected, the model underestimates their radiative power and faces challenges in intensity calibration and small‑fire placement.
By Li Zhang, Jun Wang, Isidora Jankov, Yongxin Liu, Gonzalo A. Ferrada, Ravan Ahmadov, Ligia Bernardet, Haonan Chen, Shobha Kondragunta
The paper presents modular deep learning augmentations for next‑day wildfire spread prediction, including wind‑ and slope‑conditioned attention biases, physics‑feature retrieval‑augmented output correction, and fire‑conditioned dual‑stream gating. These modules are evaluated on five backbone models using the Next Day Wildfire Spread benchmark, with staged ablations, directional audits, retrieval perturbations, calibration measures, and computational comparisons. The best augmented SwinUNETR model achieves an F1 score of 0.4216 and an AUC‑PR of 0.3673, while a mixed ensemble reaches 0.4292 and 0.3790, demonstrating that predictive performance, operational trustworthiness, and computational practicality can be simultaneously improved.
By Miguel Esparza, Aydin Ayanzadeh Ahmad Mousavi, Ali Mostafavi
The study evaluates deep learning surrogates for wildfire spread prediction, training four architectures on 10,584 high‑resolution simulations from Catalonia. Results show that only surface fuel load significantly predicts burn probability, and convolutional models mainly use distance to the fire front while a transformer model emphasizes fuel and terrain. When applied to a new region without retraining, the models still perform reasonably, with only a modest accuracy drop.
By Marcin Lawenda, Aleksandra Krasicka, David Caballero, Luis Torres, {\L}ukasz Szustak
arXiv:2608. 05265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prediction of post-wildfire debris flows is critical for mitigating hazards to communities, infrastructure, and resources during intense rainfall in recently burned areas.
By Quinn Ledingham, Zhengsen Xu, Yimin Zhu, Zack Dewis, Mabel Heffring, Saeid Taleghanidoozdoozan, Motasem Alkayid, Megan Greenwood, Lincoln Linlin Xu
arXiv:2606. 11676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread.
By Maksym Zhenirovskyy, Ion Matei, Rohit Vuppala, Takuya Kurihana, Hon Yung Wonga
The paper introduces a hybrid CNN‑cellular automaton (CNN‑CA) simulator for planning aerial wildfire suppression, trained on six historical fires. It jointly optimizes binary drop decisions and continuous aircraft trajectories while accounting for aircraft constraints, wind drift, and fuel reduction effects of water and retardant. The authors evaluate the method against random, tactical, greedy, and derivative‑free planners, showing significant reductions in simulated fire extent under a 2020 Bear Fire case study, though noting the results are conditional on the frozen simulator and not operational evidence.
By Ion Matei, Maksym Zhenirovskyy, Takuya Kurihana, Rohit Vupala, Anthony Wong
arXiv:2607. 21597v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating wildfire risk systems using standard machine-learning metrics such as F1-score or IoU is fundamentally flawed: these metrics assess event prediction accuracy, not the operational coherence of a continuous risk signal.
By Nicolas Caron, Christophe Guyeux, Hassan Noura, Maxime Coulmeau, Benjamin Aynes
ShearFuse-UNet is a lightweight deep learning model designed for next‑day wildfire spread prediction using multi‑modal satellite data. It incorporates three transform‑domain branches—Fast Walsh‑Hadamard Transform, Discrete Cosine Transform, and a cone‑adapted digital Shearlet residual—within each encoder block of a U‑Net backbone, fusing spectral representations via a learned SpectralFusion gate and adding Shearlet reconstruction as a residual. On the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, the model achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a larger ResNet18‑based U‑Net and demonstrating a favorable accuracy‑efficiency trade‑off, with additional validation on the Google Next‑Day Wildfire Spread dataset.
By Ene Meco, Yingyi Luo, Emadeldeen Hamdan, Adam Watts, Ahmet Enis Cetin
The paper introduces an AI surrogate modelling framework that accelerates wildfire hazard mapping across Canada. By training a multi‑task deep learning model on national‑scale data, the surrogate reproduces key outputs of the computationally intensive BurnP3+ simulator—burn probability, mean fire intensity, and mean rate of spread—in seconds instead of days or weeks. The framework includes standardized training, fine‑tuning, and evaluation protocols, domain‑specific metrics, and counterfactual evaluation to ensure robust out‑of‑distribution performance, achieving up to 806‑fold CPU speed‑up and 13% memory usage compared to the original simulator.
By Hager Radi Abdelwahed, Toluwaleke Olutayo, Chirag Goel, Jana Osea, Aldo Zaimi, Tom Swystun, Sandy Erni, Francisco Emiliano Lopez Saavedra, Yan Boulanger, Ga\'etan Marceau Caron
arXiv:2609.36315v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Wildfires are an increasing hazard to ecosystems, air quality, and human systems, creating a growing need for datasets that support systematic develo...
By Arya Kondur, Giosue Migliorini, Cameron Schmitt, Francesco Immorlano, Tairan Wang, Rebecca C. Scholten, Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Gary Johnson, Chris Lautenberger, Valentin Waeselynck, J. Shane Romsos, Kasra Shamsaei, Alejandro Tejedor, Tianjia Liu, Yang Chen, Padhraic Smyth, James T. Randerson
arXiv:2606. 19825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of dust source emissions is critical for mitigating the significant environmental and health hazards posed by dust storms.
By Maryam Sanisales, Zahed Rahmati, Ali Darvishi Boloorani, Ali Vefghi