Müller, Mortimer M.

Vacik, Harald

Vilardell, Lena Vila

Portal de Revistas do ICMBio (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade)

1University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Institute of Silviculture, Austria 
＊Corresponding author: harald.vacik@boku.ac.at 
 
 Número Especial: 7a Conferência Internacional sobre Incêndios Florestais - Resumos 
 
 
Towards an integrated forest fire danger assessment 
system for the alpine region 
 
Harald Vacik1*, Mortimer M. Müller1 
 
 
 
ABSTRACT – In the last years devastating forest fires around the globe proved quite well, that 
wildfires are a major issue in a world of climate change. Also the alpine region encounters higher 
temperatures, more heatwaves and an increasing number of forest fires. Improving the forest fire 
danger assessment is a core element to prevent and better anticipate the occurrence of fires. 
While meteorological systems to predict fire danger are common in many countries, other relevant 
factors as vegetation data, topography, lightning occurrence and human impact are not generally 
used. We introduce an integrated forest fire danger assessment system (IFDS) for the alpine 
country of Austria that includes i) daily fire weather index data, ii) a high resolution danger 
assessment of the vegetation, iii) a topography based estimation of fire occurrence, iv) a lightning 
fire occurrence assessment and v) a countrywide analysis of fire danger through human activities. 
The system was implemented as a prototype in early 2018 with different weighting variants. The 
main aim was and is to learn and understand the connections of the different modules and to 
identify inadequate datasets, which are likely especially regarding the parameters vegetation and 
human activity. A first performance analysis was done with forest fire data from the year 2018. It 
could be shown that the used stand-alone fire weather index had a slightly better overall prediction 
accuracy than the IFDS, while some variants of the IFDS relatively performed better when 
considering the number of false alerts. The implementation of a similar IFDS in other countries 
may be beneficial, if the necessary datasets are available at high resolution and reliability. Further 
test runs and improvements of the IFDS will be conducted in the future. 
 
Keywords: Alpine region; forest fire danger assessment; integrated fire danger; mountain forests 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Towards an integrated forest fire danger assessment system for the alpine region

http://www.icmbio.gov.br/revistaeletronica/index.php/BioBR/article/download/1197/934

Towards an integrated forest fire danger assessment system for the alpine region

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