Related papers: Estimating heterogeneous wildfire effects using sy…
We develop a cross-sectional research design to identify causal effects in the presence of unobservable heterogeneity without instruments. When units are dense in physical space, it may be sufficient to regress the "spatial first…
Recent research has demonstrated the potential of deep neural networks (DNNs) to accurately predict wildfire spread on a given day based upon high-dimensional explanatory data from a single preceding day, or from a time series of T…
Due to climate change and the disruption of ecosystems worldwide, wildfires are increasingly impacting environment, infrastructure, and human lives globally. Additionally, an exacerbating climate crisis means that these losses would…
Wildland fire dynamics is a complex turbulent dimensional process. Cellular automata (CA) is an efficient tool to predict fire dynamics, but the main parameters of the method are challenging to estimate. To overcome this challenge, we…
Smoke is the first visible indicator of a wildfire.With the advancement of deep learning, image-based smoke detection has become a crucial method for detecting and preventing forest fires. However, the scarcity of smoke image data from…
Flexible machine learning tools are increasingly used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. This paper gives an accessible tutorial demonstrating the use of the causal forest algorithm, available in the R package grf. We start with a…
Vegetation is the natural linkage connecting soil, atmosphere and water. It can represent the change of land cover to a certain extent and serve as an indicator for global change research. Methods for measuring coverage can be divided into…
We aim to identify the spatial distribution of vegetation and its growth dynamics with the purpose of obtaining a qualitative assessment of vegetation characteristics tied to its condition, productivity and health, and to land degradation.…
Accurate forecasts of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) from wildfire smoke are crucial to safeguarding cardiopulmonary public health. Existing forecasting systems are trained on sparse and inaccurate ground truths, and do not take…
Wildfires are growing in frequency and intensity, devastating ecosystems and communities while causing billions of dollars in suppression costs and economic damage annually in the U.S. Traditional wildfire management is mostly reactive,…
Seismic imaging from sparsely acquired data faces challenges such as low image quality, discontinuities, and migration swing artifacts. Existing convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods struggle with complex feature distributions…
Prescribed burns have been increasingly utilized in forest management in the past few decades. However, their effectiveness in reducing the risk of destructive wildfires has been debated. The sandpile model of self-organized criticality,…
Identifying regions that have high likelihood for wildfires is a key component of land and forestry management and disaster preparedness. We create a data set by aggregating nearly a decade of remote-sensing data and historical fire records…
Urban air quality forecasting is challenging because pollutant concentrations are nonlinear, nonstationary, spatiotemporally dependent, and often affected by anomalous observations caused by traffic congestion, industrial emissions, and…
Recent wildfires in Australia have led to considerable economic loss and property destruction, and there is increasing concern that climate change may exacerbate their intensity, duration, and frequency. Hazard quantification for extreme…
This paper presents five different statistical methods for ground scene prediction (GSP) in wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The GSP image can be used as a reference image in a change detection algorithm yielding…
As synthetic imagery is used more frequently in training deep models, it is important to understand how different synthesis techniques impact the performance of such models. In this work, we perform a thorough evaluation of the…
We propose a computationally efficient alternative to generalized random forests (GRFs) for estimating heterogeneous effects in large dimensions. While GRFs rely on a gradient-based splitting criterion, which in large dimensions is…
Wildfires, as an integral component of the Earth system, are governed by a complex interplay of atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial processes spanning a vast range of spatiotemporal scales. Modeling their global activity on large…
Statistical methods are required to evaluate and quantify the uncertainty in environmental processes, such as land and sea surface temperature, in a changing climate. Typically, annual harmonics are used to characterize the variation in the…