Journal of Geography  & Natural Disasters
Open Access

Abstract

Modeling and Assessing Temporal Distribution of Anthropogenic Factors in a Protected Area for Fire Danger Assessment

Dipuo Olga Mofokeng and Adewale Samuel Adelabu

Human activities threaten the effectiveness of Protected Areas in preserving key natural resources. Ignoring the temporal dimension of human on fire occurrence can lead to ineffectiveness fire management and preserved outcomes. This study analyzes the intra-annual dimensions of fire occurrence and human-caused fire ignition factors for the Golden Gate Highlands National Parks of South Africa. We constructed four occurrence data scenarios from fire ignition data extracted from MODIS active fire product (2007 -2017 by splitting occurrence data into two seasons and further split the seasons into weekdays and weekends. Application of MaxEnt method was used to assess the performance of the models and to explain the importance of each explanatory variable. Results revealed ROADS as the highest contributor across all the models except in Spring weekend model where INFRA outperformed ROADS. In addition, we observed strong temporal variation with ROADS strongly influencing weekdays of both seasonal scenarios while INFRA shows strong influence in the weekends. Model overall performance is satisfactory, above 0.8 AUC values for all the models (Winter Weekend = 0.977; Winter Weekday = 0.929; Spring Weekend = 0.896) except Spring Weekday (0.641). In addition, Winter models are more robust in explaining the temporal distribution of human-caused fire ignition factors of the study. Our results are reliable and significant for advising practical wildfire management and resource allocation as well as to predict the human-caused fire ignition.

Published Date: 2021-09-07;