Prescribed Fire Modeling using Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning for Land Management

In recent years, the increasing threat of devastating wildfires has underscored the need for effective prescribed fire management. Process-based computer simulations have traditionally been employed to plan prescribed fires for wildfire prevention. However, even simplified process models are too compute-intensive to be used for real-time decision-making. Traditional ML methods used for fire modeling offer computational speedup but struggle with physically inconsistent predictions, biased predictions due to class imbalance, biased estimates for fire spread metrics (e.g., burned area, rate of spread), and limited generalizability in out-of-distribution wind conditions. This paper introduces a novel machine learning (ML) framework that enables rapid emulation of prescribed fires while addressing these concerns. To overcome these challenges, the framework incorporates domain knowledge in the form of physical constraints, a hierarchical modeling structure to capture the interdependence among variables of interest, and also leverages pre-existing source domain data to augment training data and learn the spread of fire more effectively. Notably, improvement in fire metric (e.g., burned area) estimates offered by our framework makes it useful for fire managers, who often rely on these estimates to make decisions about prescribed burn management. Furthermore, our framework exhibits better generalization capabilities than the other ML-based fire modeling methods across diverse wind conditions and ignition patterns.