TY - JOUR A2 - Zitikis, Ricardas AU - Braun, W. John AU - Jones, Bruce L. AU - Lee, Jonathan S. W. AU - Woolford, Douglas G. AU - Wotton, B. Mike PY - 2010 DA - 2010/07/01 TI - Forest Fire Risk Assessment: An Illustrative Example from Ontario, Canada SP - 823018 VL - 2010 AB - This paper presents an analysis of ignition and burn risk due to wildfire in a region of Ontario, Canada using a methodology which is applicable to the entireboreal forest region. A generalized additive model was employed to obtainignition risk probabilities and a burn probability map using only historic ignitionand fire area data. Constructing fire shapes according to an accurate physicalmodel for fire spread, using a fuel map and realistic weather scenarios ispossible with the Prometheus fire growth simulation model. Thus, we applied theBurn-P3 implementation of Prometheus to construct a more accurate burnprobability map. The fuel map for the study region was verified and corrected. Burn-P3 simulations were run under the settings (related to weather)recommended in the software documentation and were found to be fairly robustto errors in the fuel map, but simulated fire sizes were substantially larger thanthose observed in the historic record. By adjusting the input parameters to reflectsuppression effects, we obtained a model which gives more appropriate firesizes. The resulting burn probability map suggests that risk of fire in the studyarea is much lower than what is predicted by Burn-P3 under its recommendedsettings. SN - 1687-952X UR - https://doi.org/10.1155/2010/823018 DO - 10.1155/2010/823018 JF - Journal of Probability and Statistics PB - Hindawi Publishing Corporation KW - ER -