AUTHOR=Pais Cristobal , Carrasco Jaime , Martell David L. , Weintraub Andres , Woodruff David L. 

TITLE=Cell2Fire: A Cell-Based Forest Fire Growth Model to Support Strategic Landscape Management Planning

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Forests and Global Change

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2021.692706

DOI=10.3389/ffgc.2021.692706

ISSN=2624-893X

ABSTRACT=Cell2Fire is a new cell-based wildland fire growth simulator designed to integrate data-driven decision-making models. The fire environment is modeled by partitioning the landscape into cells characterized by fuel, weather, moisture, and topographic attributes. It can use existing fire spread models such as the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior Prediction System to model fire growth. Cell2Fire is structured to facilitate its use for predicting the growth of individual fires or embedding it in landscape management simulation models. Decision-making models such as fuel treatment/harvesting plans can be easily integrated and evaluated. It incorporates a series of out-of-the-box planning heuristics providing baselines to decision-makers. We illustrate their use by applying and evaluating a series of harvesting plans for forest landscapes in Canada. We validated Cell2Fire by using it to predict the growth of both real and hypothetical fires, comparing our predictions with the fire scars produced by a validated fire growth simulator (Prometheus).  Cell2Fire is implemented as an open-source project that exploits parallelism to efficiently support the modeling of fire growth across large spatial and temporal scales.