Wildfire fuels mapping through artificial intelligence-based methods: A review

Accurate and near real-time knowledge of the spatio-temporal characteristics of fuels is critical for analyzing pre-fire risk mitigation and managing active-fire emergency response. Geospatial modeling and land cover mapping using remote sensing combined with artificial intelligence techniques can provide fuel information at regional scales with high accuracy and resolution, as evidenced by the extensive recent work in the literature that appeared with increasing volume in the open literature.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in wildfire fuel mapping, focusing on the research frontier of fire fuel models, fuel mapping methods, remote sensing data sources, existing datasets/reference maps, and applicable artificial intelligence techniques. The main findings highlight the increasing research on fire fuel mapping worldwide, with a considerable emphasis on multispectral imagery and the Random Forest classifier for its efficacy with limited data.