We present a multi-temporal, multi-modal remote-sensing dataset for predicting how active wildfires will spread at a resolution of 24 hours. The dataset consists of 13 607 images across 607 fire events in the United States from January 2018 to October 2021. For each fire event, the dataset contains a full time series of daily observations, containing detected active fires and variables related to fuel, topography and weather conditions. The dataset is challenging due to: a) its inputs being multi-temporal, b) the high number of 23 multi-modal input channels, c) highly imbalanced labels and d) noisy labels, due to smoke, clouds, and inaccuracies in the active fire detection.

The vast amount of data required to model wildfires at a larger scale presents difficulties in the collection and curation of the data.

In a move to help alert people to the spread of nearby blazes, Ring is partnering with Watch Duty to let users share their videos on the wildfire tracking app. The nonprofit Watch Duty is partnering with Ring, the Amazon-owned maker of doorbell cameras, to help users share videos of nearby wildfires on Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app. The result is Fire Watch, a new feature being added to Ring's Neighbors app, the stand-alone service that lets users see activity from nearby Ring cameras. If there is a fire in the area, users will be notified and can go into an emergency mode that lets them share videos from their Ring cameras to the feed about that specific fire on Watch Duty's platform . It's not a posting free-for-all; Watch Duty says it will choose which Ring videos to show in Fire Watch, based on relevance.

We present a multi-temporal, multi-modal remote-sensing dataset for predicting how active wildfires will spread at a resolution of 24 hours. The dataset consists of 13607 images across 607 fire events in the United States from January 2018 to October 2021. For each fire event, the dataset contains a full time series of daily observations, containing detected active fires and variables related to fuel, topography and weather conditions. The dataset is challenging due to: a) its inputs being multi-temporal, b) the high number of 23 multi-modal input channels, c) highly imbalanced labels and d) noisy labels, due to smoke, clouds, and inaccuracies in the active fire detection. The underlying complexity of the physical processes adds to these challenges. Compared to existing public datasets in this area, WildfireSpreadTS allows for multi-temporal modeling of spreading wildfires, due to its time series structure. Furthermore, we provide additional input modalities and a high spatial resolution of 375m for the active fire maps. We publish this dataset to encourage further research on this important task with multi-temporal, noise-resistant or generative methods, uncertainty estimation or advanced optimization techniques that deal with the high-dimensional input space.

California's wildfire season keeps getting worse over the years, overwhelming the emergency response teams. These fires cause massive destruction to both property and human life. Because of these reasons, there's a growing need for accurate and practical predictions that can help assist with resources allocation for the Wildfire managers or the response teams. In this research, we built machine learning models to predict the number of days it will require to fully contain a wildfire in California. Here, we addressed an important gap in the current literature. Most prior research has concentrated on wildfire risk or how fires spread, and the few that examine the duration typically predict it in broader categories rather than a continuous measure. This research treats the wildfire duration prediction as a regression task, which allows for more detailed and precise forecasts rather than just the broader categorical predictions used in prior work. We built the models by combining three publicly available datasets from California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP). This study compared the performance of baseline ensemble regressor, Random Forest and XGBoost, with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network. The results show that the XGBoost model slightly outperforms the Random Forest model, likely due to its superior handling of static features in the dataset. The LSTM model, on the other hand, performed worse than the ensemble models because the dataset lacked temporal features. Overall, this study shows that, depending on the feature availability, Wildfire managers or Fire management authorities can select the most appropriate model to accurately predict wildfire containment duration and allocate resources effectively.

Climate change has intensified the frequency and severity of wildfires, making rapid and accurate prediction of fire spread essential for effective mitigation and response. Physics-based simulators such as FARSITE offer high-fidelity predictions but are computationally intensive, limiting their applicability in real-time decision-making, while existing deep learning models often yield overly smooth predictions that fail to capture the complex, nonlinear dynamics of wildfire propagation. This study proposes an autoregressive conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) for probabilistic wildfire spread prediction. By formulating the prediction task as an autoregressive problem, the model learns sequential state transitions, ensuring long-term prediction stability. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CGAN-based model outperforms conventional deep learning models in both overall predictive accuracy and boundary delineation of fire perimeters. These results demonstrate that adversarial learning allows the model to capture the strong nonlinearity and uncertainty of wildfire spread, instead of simply fitting the pixel average. Furthermore, the autoregressive framework facilitates systematic temporal forecasting of wildfire evolution. The proposed CGAN-based autoregressive framework enhances both the accuracy and physical interpretability of wildfire spread prediction, offering a promising foundation for time-sensitive response and evacuation planning.

Predicting the spread of wildfires is essential for effective fire management and risk assessment. With the fast advancements of artificial intelligence (AI), various deep learning models have been developed and utilized for wildfire spread prediction. However, there is limited understanding of the advantages and limitations of these models, and it is also unclear how deep learning-based fire spread models can be compared with existing non-AI fire models. In this work, we assess the ability of five typical deep learning models integrated with weather and environmental variables for wildfire spread prediction based on over ten years of wildfire data in the state of Hawaii. We further use the 2023 Maui fires as a case study to compare the best deep learning models with a widely-used fire spread model, FARSITE. The results show that two deep learning models, i.e., ConvLSTM and ConvLSTM with attention, perform the best among the five tested AI models. FARSITE shows higher precision, lower recall, and higher F1-score than the best AI models, while the AI models offer higher flexibility for the input data. By integrating AI models with an explainable AI method, we further identify important weather and environmental factors associated with the 2023 Maui wildfires.

Wildfires significantly impact natural ecosystems and human health, leading to biodiversity loss, increased hydrogeological risks, and elevated emissions of toxic substances. Climate change exacerbates these effects, particularly in regions with rising temperatures and prolonged dry periods, such as the Mediterranean. This requires the development of advanced risk management strategies that utilize state-of-the-art technologies. However, in this context, the data show a bias toward an imbalanced setting, where the incidence of wildfire events is significantly lower than typical situations. This imbalance, coupled with the inherent complexity of high-dimensional spatio-temporal data, poses significant challenges for training deep learning architectures. Moreover, since precise wildfire predictions depend mainly on weather data, finding a way to reduce computational costs to enable more frequent updates using the latest weather forecasts would be beneficial. This paper investigates how adopting a contrastive framework can address these challenges through enhanced latent representations for the patch's dynamic features. We thus introduce a new morphology-based curriculum contrastive learning that mitigates issues associated with diverse regional characteristics and enables the use of smaller patch sizes without compromising performance. An experimental analysis is performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling strategies.

This paper describes the experiences and lessons learned after the deployment of a country-scale environmental digital twin on the island of Cyprus for three years. This digital twin, called GAEA, contains 27 environmental geospatial services and is suitable for urban planners, policymakers, farmers, property owners, real-estate and forestry professionals, as well as insurance companies and banks that have properties in their portfolio. This paper demonstrates the power, potential, current and future challenges of geospatial analytics and environmental digital twins on a large scale.