arXiv Machine Learning

Evaluating AlphaEarth Foundations Embeddings for Wildfire Susceptibility Mapping

arXiv:2608. 12663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wildfire susceptibility mapping typically relies on physical variables assembled from multiple remote-sensing, climate, and geospatial products.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Annual Earth-observation embeddings encode wildfire disturbance and support simplified burned area mapping

Annual Earth‑observation embeddings, specifically Tessera, can encode wildfire disturbance signals well enough to map burned areas without needing curated fire‑specific imagery or dense time‑series analysis. In tests, linear models using a single Tessera embedding matched or outperformed paired pre‑ and post‑fire HLS imagery and post‑fire imagery alone, achieving high F1 scores for burn‑scar delineation and regional mapping. The approach successfully mapped all same‑year fires in benchmark scenes, recovered 97% of California burned area without California training data, transferred to European fires with high accuracy, and even estimated ignition timing within a 13‑day error margin. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that pre‑trained annual embeddings can simplify and scale burned‑area mapping, reducing reliance on dense time‑series data and enabling more efficient wildfire monitoring."

By Jovana Knezevic, Clement Atzberger, Zhengpeng Feng, Adam F. A. Pellegrini, Srinivasan Keshav, David Coomes
arXiv AI
4d ago

PyroStack: A Multi-Band Spatio-Temporal Sub-Daily Dataset for Wildfires in the United States

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 Machine Learning
Sep 17

Modular Deep Learning Mechanisms for Auditable Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Scalable Geospatial Machine Learning for Power-Line Asset Risk: Integrating Remote Sensing for Lightning and Vegetation Risk Modelling

The paper presents a modular, scalable framework for estimating the probability of failure (PoF) of power‑line assets using geospatial machine learning. It integrates diverse environmental predictors—topography, vegetation indices, lightning climatology, proximity features, and operational records—to model vegetation‑ and lightning‑related failure modes. The architecture is designed to be computationally efficient, easily extensible to new data sources, and suitable for large‑scale utility deployment, enabling asset‑level risk stratification for inspection and resilience planning.

By Artur Sokolovsky, Bhavik Merai, Moe Jafari, Muen Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Integrating national forest inventory, airborne lidar, and satellite imagery for wall-to-wall mapping of forest structure with computer vision

arXiv:2606. 20291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes.

By Luke J. Zachmann, David D. Diaz, Vincent A. Landau, Chelsey Walden-Schreiner, Tony Chang, Nathan E. Rutenbeck, Katharyn A. Duffy, Kiarie Ndegwa, Andreas Gros, Scott Conway, Guy Bayes
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Earth Surface Immune System for Rapid Monitoring of Unknown Anomalies

The paper introduces ESIA, an Earth Surface Immune System that detects and recognizes unknown anomalies in satellite imagery without prior category knowledge. It uses a non‑specific innate stage for rapid localization and a specific adaptive stage that matches image patches to text prompts via a multi‑modal model, achieving high F1 scores. The system adapts to new scenes in seconds and has been validated on a large global dataset, with applications to farmland degradation after the Kakhovka Dam collapse and burn severity assessment from the 2025 Palisades Fire.

By Jingtao Li, Qian Zhu, Xinyu Wang, Deren Li, Liangpei Zhang, Yanfei Zhong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

Multisource Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis of Vineyard Wildfire Impacts and Resilience: The 2019 Kincade Fire

The study analyzes vineyard resilience to the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County using a comprehensive geospatial framework that includes Sentinel‑2 imagery, weather data, soil and terrain models, and smoke polygons. It finds that vineyard fields experienced lower immediate spectral damage (dNBR) than surrounding wildland vegetation, yet this advantage does not translate into a universal firebreak effect; conditional models reveal a positive association between vineyard fraction and dNBR after accounting for location, terrain, and water use. Additionally, all vineyards were exposed to smoke, a significant portion of road nodes became dead ends, and vineyards inside the fire perimeter showed a slightly larger greenness deficit through 2021, indicating incomplete resilience. whyItMatters":"The findings demonstrate that lower spectral impact does not guarantee full resilience, highlighting the need for nuanced, data‑driven decision support in managing agricultural landscapes during wildfires."

By Parastoo Farajpoor, Mahla Ardebili Pour, Mohammad Bagher Ghiasi, Mohammadreza Narimani