FireInSite: An accessible, integrated fire behaviour prediction system for wildfire management

Wildfire risk is increasing in temperate regions like the UK and NW Europe, but we lack operational tools to support wildfire management decision-making needs. We developed FireInSite to address the need for a user-oriented system for predicting fire behaviour. FireInSite is a fire behaviour prediction system in the form of a web-based application that forecasts the probability of ignition, surface fire rate of spread, flame length and fireline intensity for a user selected location for a set of core UK fire prone fuels. By seamlessly integrating geolocated weather forecasts up to 5 days ahead, topographic data, and in-built UK specific fuel models, FireInSite creates an accessible system that removes barriers like the need to gather data from multiple sources and is designed to minimise the number of inputs and decisions users must make before being able to predict fire behaviour. FireInSite can be used to assess the risk of fire in a particular area, plan for fire prevention and suppression, assess the potential effects of fuel load reduction, and educate the public about fire behaviour. We envision FireInSite being useful as a land management planning tool to assess the potential impacts of proposed landscape changes on potential fire behaviour.

FireInSite is built on over four years of intensive data collection of fuel moisture, fuel flammability, and energy contents measured across the UK for key fire prone vegetation types, which have been used to develop fuel models that describe the fire prone fuel types of the UK landscape for the first time. No other fire behaviour prediction system contains fuel models that have been specifically designed and tailored to UK vegetation and are ready inbuilt for use in the system. It also allows the user to select custom developed fuel moisture models, explore past fire behaviour using historical weather records back to 1970, and compare weather and fuel moisture forecasts to conditions in previous years. As FireInSite fuel models capture seasonal variability in fuel flammability and moisture for a range of temperate, humid fuels, we anticipate that FireInSite will also be transferable and of interest for wildfire management in other temperate regions like north western Europe.