Forest Fire Risk Assessment An Illustrative Example from Ontario, Canada.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2010, Article ID 823018, 26 pages doi:10.1155/2010/823018 Research Article Forest Fire Risk Assessment: An Illustrative Example from Ontario, Canada W. John Braun,1 Bruce L. Jones,1 Jonathan S. W. Lee,1 Douglas G. Woolford,2 and B. Mike Wotton3 1 Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, ON, Canada N6A 5B7 2 Department of Mathematics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3C5 3 Faculty of Forestry, The University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3B3 Correspondence should be addressed to W. John Braun, braun@stats.uwo.ca Received 2 October 2009; Revised 6 March 2010; Accepted 27 April 2010 Academic Editor: Ricardas Zitikis Copyright q 2010 W. John Braun et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper presents an analysis of ignition and burn risk due to wildfire in a region of Ontario, Canada using a methodology which is applicable to the entire boreal forest region. A generalized additive model was employed to obtain ignition risk probabilities and a burn probability map using only historic ignition and fire area data. Constructing fire shapes according to an accurate physical model for fire spread, using a fuel map and realistic weather scenarios is possible with the Prometheus fire growth simulation model. Thus, we applied the Burn-P3 implementation of Prometheus to construct a more accurate burn probability map. The fuel map for the study region was verified and corrected. Burn-P3 simulations were run un