Adam C. Watts

Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni, Abolfazl Razi, Sahand Khoshdel et al.

Wildfires have emerged as one of the most destructive natural disasters worldwide, causing catastrophic losses in both human lives and forest wildlife. Recently, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in wildfires, propelled by the integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning models, has created an unprecedented momentum to implement and develop more effective wildfire management. Although some of the existing survey papers have explored various learning-based approaches, a comprehensive review emphasizing the application of AI-enabled UAV systems and their subsequent impact on multi-stage wildfire management is notably lacking. This survey aims to bridge these gaps by offering a systematic review of the recent state-of-the-art technologies, highlighting the advancements of UAV systems and AI models from pre-fire, through the active-fire stage, to post-fire management. To this aim, we provide an extensive analysis of the existing remote sensing systems with a particular focus on the UAV advancements, device specifications, and sensor technologies relevant to wildfire management. We also examine the pre-fire and post-fire management approaches, including fuel monitoring, prevention strategies, as well as evacuation planning, damage assessment, and operation strategies. Additionally, we review and summarize a wide range of computer vision techniques in active-fire management, with an emphasis on Machine Learning (ML), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms for wildfire classification, segmentation, detection, and monitoring tasks. Ultimately, we underscore the substantial advancement in wildfire modeling through the integration of cutting-edge AI techniques and UAV-based data, providing novel insights and enhanced predictive capabilities to understand dynamic wildfire behavior.

Ishfaq Aziz, Elahe Soltanaghai, Adam Watts et al.

Accurate estimation of sub-surface properties such as moisture content and depth of soil and vegetation layers is crucial for applications spanning sub-surface condition monitoring, precision agriculture, and effective wildfire risk assessment. Soil in nature is often covered by overlaying vegetation and surface organic material, making its characterization challenging. In addition, the estimation of the properties of the overlaying layer is crucial for applications like wildfire risk assessment. This study thus proposes a Bayesian model-updating-based approach for ground penetrating radar (GPR) waveform inversion to predict moisture contents and depths of soil and overlaying material layer. Due to its high correlation with moisture contents, the dielectric permittivity of both layers were predicted with the proposed method, along with other parameters, including depth and electrical conductivity of layers. The proposed Bayesian model updating approach yields probabilistic estimates of these parameters that can provide information about the confidence and uncertainty related to the estimates. The methodology was evaluated for a diverse range of experimental data collected through laboratory and field investigations. Laboratory investigations included variations in soil moisture values, depth of the overlaying surface layer, and coarseness of its material. The field investigation included measurement of field soil moisture for sixteen days. The results demonstrated predictions consistent with time-domain reflectometry (TDR) measurements and conventional gravimetric tests. The depth of the surface layer could also be predicted with reasonable accuracy. The proposed method provides a promising approach for uncertainty-aware sub-surface parameter estimation that can enable decision-making for risk assessment across a wide range of applications.

Riyaaz Uddien Shaik, Mohamad Alipour, Eric Rowell et al.

Accurate assessment of fuel conditions is a prerequisite for fire ignition and behavior prediction, and risk management. The method proposed herein leverages diverse data sources including Landsat-8 optical imagery, Sentinel-1 (C-band) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, PALSAR (L-band) SAR imagery, and terrain features to capture comprehensive information about fuel types and distributions. An ensemble model was trained to predict landscape-scale fuels such as the 'Scott and Burgan 40' using the as-received Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field survey plot data obtained from the USDA Forest Service. However, this basic approach yielded relatively poor results due to the inadequate amount of training data. Pseudo-labeled and fully synthetic datasets were developed using generative AI approaches to address the limitations of ground truth data availability. These synthetic datasets were used for augmenting the FIA data from California to enhance the robustness and coverage of model training. The use of an ensemble of methods including deep learning neural networks, decision trees, and gradient boosting offered a fuel mapping accuracy of nearly 80\%. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation, the effectiveness of the proposed approach was validated for regions of the 2021 Dixie and Caldor fires. Comparative analyses against high-resolution data from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) and timber harvest maps affirmed the robustness and reliability of the proposed approach, which is capable of near-real-time fuel mapping.