Chancellery Research - Research Publications
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ItemA forest fuel dryness forecasting system that integrates an automated fuel sensor network, gridded weather, landscape attributes and machine learning models(Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2022)Accurate and timely forecasting of forest fuel moisture is critical for decision making in the context of bushfire risk and prescribed burning. The moisture content in forest fuels is a driver of ignition probability and contributes to the success of fuel hazard reduction burns. Forecasting capacity is extremely limited because traditional modelling approaches have not kept pace with rapid technological developments of field sensors, weather forecasting and data-driven modelling approaches. This research aims to develop and test a 7-day-ahead forecasting system for forest fuel dryness that integrates an automated fuel sensor network, gridded weather, landscape attributes and machine learning models. The integrated system was established across a diverse range of 30 sites in south-eastern Australia. Fuel moisture was measured hourly using 10-hour automated fuel sticks. A subset of long-term sites (5 years of data) was used to evaluate the relative performance of a selection of machine learning (Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM)), statistical (VARMAX) and process-based models. The best performing models were evaluated at all 30 sites where data availability was more limited, demonstrating the models' performance in a real-world scenario on operational sites prone to data limitations. The models were driven by daily 7-day continent-scale gridded weather forecasts, in-situ fuel moisture observation and site variables. The model performance was evaluated based on the capacity to successfully predict minimum daily fuel dryness within the burnable range for fuel reduction (11 – 16%) and bushfire risk (