AI Geospatial Wildfire Risk Prediction

Wildfires are unplanned fire events that occur both naturally and as a result of human activity. In the United States, they are responsible for several billion dollars in costs each year [1], and in 2020, they burned over 10 million acres in the United States alone [2]. Much of the costs come from prevention efforts. For example the state of California recently approved a wildfire prevention budget of over $1.5 billion [3]. Deciding on where to allocate that spending requires knowledge of which areas are at high risk, so in this article, I present a framework for providing up-to-date maps of fire risk using deep learning image processing and geospatial datasets. <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-geospatial-wildfire-risk-prediction-8c6b1d415eb4">Website</a>