Modeling Neighborhoods as Fuel for Wildfire: A Review

Wildfire’s destruction of homes is an increasingly serious global problem. Research indicates that characterizing home hardening and defensible space at the individual structure level may reduce loss through enriched understanding of structure susceptibility in the built environment. However, improved data and methods are required to accurately characterize these features at scale. This paper does three things: (1) Identifies features correlated with structure loss. (2) Compares methods of characterizing structure susceptibility, including home assessments and emerging fire spread models. (3) Evaluates methods and open data sources used to measure these features. We find that relative feature importance varies widely among studies due to data limitations and scale issues. Built-environment fire spread models show limited inclusion of structure-level features. Additional research, model validation, improved data, and improved data collection methods are needed to bridge the gaps between primary research, susceptibility indices, and built-environment fire spread models. Advancing scalable methods for characterizing built-environment fuels and susceptibility will refine risk mitigation efforts globally.