Improved estimation of the ignition danger of forest fires in Austria

The fuel moisture of the litter in the forest is a critical element for estimating the ignition danger of forest fires. The Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) currently used in Austria delivers sometimes unsatisfactory results with regard to the prediction accuracy of the ignition danger. Within the framework of the IGNITE project, the aim is to improve the accuracy of the prediction of the ignition danger for Austrian conditions.The basis for this are i) in-situ measurements of the fuel moisture in different forest types, ii) ignition experiments of various fuel materials with different moisture contents, iii) the creation of a spatially high-resolution (100x100m²) vegetation map for the estimation of the ignition danger considering tree species, canopy structure and gaps, litter moisture and topography, and iv) the validation of the FWI using existing forest fire data, the empirical data obtained in the experiments and field campaigns and causal machine learning approaches. The final products are a map of the ignition danger for forest fires based on the vegetation and an improved classification of the FWI, which will be made public available via webservices.