Wildfire CE - Data for Fuel and Fire Modelling

This repository collects data needed for modelling fire behaviour and further wildfire danger maps at  pilot regions for the Wildfire CE project. 

NOTE ============

Version from 9 onwards uses the 10 m canopy height (CH) layer from:

• Lang, Nico, et al.. "A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth." arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.08322 (2022)

as opposed to: 1 m resolution layer from:

• Tolan, J., et al. 2024. Very high resolution canopy height maps from RGB imagery using self-supervised vision transformer and convolutional decoder trained on aerial lidar. Remote Sensing of Environment, 300, p.113888.

to estimate  Canopy Base Height, Canopy Bulk Density and Canopy Height. The latter CH layer presented strips of empty data and underestimated CH values in valleys and areas with low direct illumination. 

For direct visualization please use the GEE app https://progetto-eu-h2020-cirgeo.projects.earthengine.app/view/wildfire.

Data layers

• raster of Canopy Height Model (m)
• raster of Canopy Base Height (m)
• raster of Canopy Bulk Density (kg/m3)
• raster of Topography DEM (m a.s.l.) from   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4056634
• raster of Topography Slope (percentage)
• raster of Topography Aspect (degrees with respect to North, clockwise direction)
• vector of Roads from Open Street Map (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway)
• vector of Pilot Sites area and of Pilot Regions
• raster of Fuel Models according to Scott&Burgan Scott JH, Burgan RE (2005) Standard fire behavior fuel models: A comprehensive set for use with Rothermel’s surface fire spread model. USDA Forest Service - General Technical Report RMRS-GTR 1–76. doi:10.2737/RMRS-GTR-153

Other layers

• FuelModel_ScottBurganClasses.(qml,sld) QML (QGIS style file) and SLD (Styled Layer Descriptor file) for Fuel Models

Files naming convention

The file naming without the extents uses the following syntax:  <group>_<NUTS-IDs>_<layer> 

<group>
       Areas are grouped in  pilot regions or pilot sites (in this version only pilot regions).
       Examples:
          pilotRegions      = regional-scale datasets 
          pilotSites        =   localized study areas
 <NUTS-IDs>
       NUTS codes of participating countries separated by '-'
       Examples:
           AT-CZ     = Austria / Czech Republic
           IT-SI     = Italy / Slovenia 
           DE-CZ     = Germany / Czech Republic 
 <layer>
       short, lowercase descriptors using underscores between levels of description
       Examples:
           topography_dem
           topography_slopeDegrees
           canopy_canopyBaseHeight
           canopy_canopyBulkDensity  

Grid alignment 

All data are in the coordinate reference system EPSG:3035 ETRS89-extended / LAEA Europe and grid cells are at 30 x 30 m cells. It is an equal-area  projection, it preserves areas across its bounds so each pixel is 900 m².  Axes origin is at 10° East and 52° North and the false Easting and Northing are respectively 4321000 m and 3210000 m . All 30 m cells are aligned to this origin, i.e. a 30x30 m cell at the origin will have its cell center at 4321015 m E and 3210015 m N and the left-bottom corner at 4321000 m E and 3210000 m N. All rasters have the same origin and cell resolution and are thus geometrically aligned.

The grid is aligned to the Copernicus Land Cover service grid (e.g. 10 m resolution Corine Land Cover Backbone).

Formats

All raster files are at 30 m cell resolution in GeoTIFF with LZW compression in 32 bit floating point values and cloud-optimized (pyramid internal layers). - only rasters with fuel models are in 16-bit unsigned integer format. The fuel models' rasters could potentially be saved as 8-bit integers but fire behaviour models often requires stricktly 16 or 32 bits integers.

All vector files are in Geopackage format.