Prediction of Boreal Peatland Fires in Canada using Spatio-Temporal Methods (Papers Track)
Shreya Bali (Carnegie Mellon University); Sydney Zheng (Carnegie Mellon University); Akshina Gupta (Carnegie Mellon University); Yue Wu (None); Blair Chen (Carnegie Mellon University); Anirban Chowdhury (Carnegie Mellon University); Justin Khim (Carnegie Mellon University)
Abstract
Peat fires are the largest fires on earth in terms of fuel consumption and are responsible for a significant portion of global carbon emissions. Predicting fires in the peatlands can help decision-makers and researchers monitor and prevent peat fires. Despite this, research on predicting peatland fires remains largely understudied as compared to the prediction of other forms of fires. However, peatland fires are unique among fires and therefore require datasets and architectures attuned to their particular characteristics. In this paper, we present a new dataset, PeatSet, designed specifically for the problem of peatland fire prediction. In addition, we propose several models to tackle the problem of fire prediction for the peatlands. We develop novel neural architectures for peatland fire prediction, PeatNet, and PT-Net, with a graph-based and a transformer-based architecture, respectively. Our results indicate that these new deep-learning architectures outperform a regression baseline from existing peatland research. Among all the tested models, PT-Net achieves the highest F1 score of 0.1006 and an overall accuracy of 99.84%.