At risk of fire: Geography of the Wildland-Urban Interface in British Columbia

在加拿大的荒地-城市界面（WUI）和更普遍的荒地-开发界面（WDI），野火的风险和社会经济成本预计将继续增长。WUI是一个人类发展与荒地植被相邻并相互交织的地区，导致野火和财产、生命和牲畜损失的风险。社区靠近易燃植被，这意味着WUI包含了灾难性野火造成的大部分房屋损失，例如，在2003年具有历史意义的火灾季节，不列颠哥伦比亚省有300多所房屋被毁。WUI和WDI的地理识别和绘制对于分配灭火资源、进行多尺度野火威胁分析以及制定战略性燃料处理计划至关重要。我们的研究旨在通过创新的空间分析方法，利用经济、高效和准确的工具，改善不列颠哥伦比亚省荒地和人类发展界面的火灾风险制图。我们建议开发和验证一种基于卫星遥感数据绘制WUI和WDI的创新方法，以促进人类与野火安全共存的综合策略的新兴研究，并满足我们的工业合作伙伴Valhalla环境咨询公司的地理需求。我们的研究产品将使Valhalla能够提供表征火灾风险的战略信息，并以有效和及时的方式在相对广泛的空间尺度上量化这种人类火灾关注的程度。我们与Valhalla的合作有可能在灭火中节省资金和生命，并通过确定低风险区域，在不付出社会经济代价的情况下允许火灾燃烧，从而在加拿大森林景观中发挥更环保的可持续作用。

The risks and socioeconomic costs of wildfire are expected to continue growing in Canada's wildland-urban interface (WUI) and more generally, the wildland-development interface (WDI). The WUI is a region where human development abuts and intermingles with wildland vegetation, resulting in a risk of wildfire and the loss of property, lives, and livestock. The close proximity of communities to flammable vegetation means the WUI contains the bulk of housing loss due to catastrophic wildfire, for example with over 300 homes in British Columbia destroyed in the historic 2003 fire season. Geographic identification and mapping of the WUI and WDI is critical for allocating suppression resources, conducting multi-scale wildfire threat analysis, and for strategic fuel treatment programs. Our research aims to improve fire risk mapping of the interface of wildlands and human development in British Columbia through innovative spatial analysis using a cost-effective, efficient, and accurate tools. We propose the development and validation of an innovative method for mapping the WUI and WDI based on satellite-based remotely sensed data to contribute to emerging research on integrated strategies for humans to safely coexist with wildfire and meet the geographic needs of our industrial partner, Valhalla Environmental Consulting. Our research products will enable Valhalla to provide strategic information for characterizing fire risk and quantify the magnitude of this human-fire concern over relatively broad spatial scales in an efficient and timely manner. Our partnership with Valhalla has the potential to save money and lives in fire fighting, and move toward a more environmentally sustainable role of fire in Canadian forest landscapes by identifying low-risk areas where fires could be allowed to burn for natural ecosystem gains without socioeconomic costs.