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This cartographic product estimates Exposure based on a simple approach that considers the resources potentially exposed to wildfire effects. Even though different methods have been proposed to estimate this variable (see deliverable D.1.4 and (Chuvieco et al. 2023), within this version of the integrated risk component only three categories of exposure were considered, given them a certain weight in relation to the importance of being potentially affected by fire:
• Unburnable (code 0), including water, bare soil and urban dense.
• Burnable (code 0.8), including all vegetation categories that are susceptible of being burned.
• Burnable and with Wildland Urban Interface (WUI (Code 1). Includes burnable categories within a radius of 1 km of an urbanized area.
Fire risk component: Exposure
Contact details of the developer: Avi Bar Massada <avi-b@sci.haifa.ac.il>
For mapping the WUI at ET scale, first the extension of the urbanized area was mapped, based on the 2019 World Settlement Footprint dataset (WSF). This dataset was generated by automated interpretation of 10-m resolution Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, and each pixel is either built-up or not. Next, vegetation data was gathered from the 2020 European Space Agency (ESA) global land cover product (Zanaga et al. 2020). This dataset is a classification of the same 10-m Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, in conjunction with auxiliary data, into 11 land cover classes. This dataset was reclassified into two classes: woody vegetation classes (‘forests’ and ‘shrublands’, “1”) and others (“0”). Hence, the research focused on fire hazard only from woody vegetation, regardless of species identity and fuel characteristics.
The most common approach for WUI mapping distinguishes between WUI intermix and interface classes (Radeloff et al. 2005). An intermix WUI is a unit area that: 1: comprises enough buildings exposed to wildfire risk; and 2: contains or is directly surrounded by sufficient amounts of flammable vegetation. An interface WUI is a unit area that contains buildings that are not directly surrounded by flammable vegetation yet is within a relatively short distance from a contiguous patch of flammable vegetation which can produce firebrands. To map the WUI, the parameters of the existing point-based WUI mapping approach were modified (Bar-Massada et al. 2013), which is based on the original US WUI mapping approach.
The new approach adapts the 10 m-cell grid of the underlying datasets and includes the following steps:
1. Including all cells within 100 m of a built-up cell as candidate WUI locations, regardless of the housing density within (and around) them in order to identify all built-up areas that are potentially at risk.
2. Calculating the percent cover of woody vegetation within a 500 m radius around candidate WUI location cells; if woody cover was greater than 50%, these cells were mapped as ‘intermix WUI’.
3. Identifying patches of woody vegetation that were larger than 5 km2.
4. Identifying all candidate WUI locations that were within 600 m to large vegetation patches; these cells were mapped as ‘interface WUI’. The choice of 600 m reflects findings about the approximate median value of maximum travel distances of flying embers. This threshold differs from the previously used distance of 2,400 m (Carlson et al. 2022; Radeloff et al. 2005), which reflects maximum travel distances. The result of this process is a WUI map at either PS scale (if built-up information was based on individual buildings; five WUI maps overall) or ET scale (when the input was the WSF dataset; one WUI map for the entire ET). Based on these maps, we quantified the overall extent and the spatial distribution of interface, intermix, and total WUI at the country level for each country in our study area. We also calculated the variation in WUI cover within countries, by overlaying a map of statistical regions at NUTS-3 level obtained from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. The WUI maps generated here are available for download in the project’s data repository.
References
Bar-Massada, A., Stewart, S.I., Hammer, R.B., Mockrin, M.H., & Radeloff, V.C. (2013). Using structure locations as a basis for mapping the wildland urban interface. Journal of Environmental Management, 128, 540-547.
Carlson, A.R., Helmers, D.P., Hawbaker, T.J., Mockrin, M.H., & Radeloff, V.C. (2022). The wildland–urban interface in the United States based on 125 million building locations. Ecological Applications, 32.
Chuvieco, E., Yebra, M., Martino, S., Thonicke, K., Gómez-Giménez, M., San-Miguel, J., Oom, D., Ramona Velea, Florent Mouillot, Juan R. Molina, Ana I. Miranda, Diogo Lopes, Michele Salis, Marin Bugaric, Mikhail Sofiev, Evgeny Kadantsev, Ioannis Gitas, Dimitris Stavrakoudis, George Eftychidis, Bar-Massada, A., Alex Neidermeier, Valerio Pampanoni, Pettinari, M.L., Arrogante, F., Ochoa, C., Moreira, B., & Viegas, D. (2023). Towards an integrated approach to wildfire risk assessment: when, where, what and how may the landscapes burn. Fire, 6, 215, doi210.3390/fire6050215.
Radeloff, V.C., Hammer, R.B., Stewart, S.I., Fried, J.S., Holcomb, S.S., & McKeefry, J.F. (2005). The wildland-urban interface in the United States. Ecological Applications, 15, 799-805.
Zanaga, D., Van De Kerchove, R., Daems, D., De Keersmaecker, W., Brockmann, C., Kirches, G., Wevers, J., Cartus, O., Santoro, M., Fritz, S., & Arino, O. (2020). ESA WorldCover 10 m 2020 v100.