An integrated approach leveraging remote sensing, geospatial analysis, and machine learning algorithms for high-resolution wildfire susceptibility assessment and identification of environmental drivers in El Tarf Province, Algeria.

内容摘要

The growing frequency and extent of wildfires constitute a significant environmental challenge, posing serious threats to ecosystems, biodiversity, and human livelihoods. This study presents a comprehensive wildfire susceptibility assessment for El Tarf Province, one of the most fire-prone yet understudied regions in Algeria. Long-term Landsat imagery (1995-2024) combined with four machine learning algorithms was used to produce high-resolution susceptibility maps and identify the key environmental and bioclimatic drivers of wildfire occurrence. Ten conditioning factors representing topographic, vegetative, edaphic, and climatic conditions were integrated, with elevation, Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), wind speed, and precipitation emerging as dominant predictors. Among the tested models, Random Forest achieved the highest predictive performance (ROC-AUC = 0.897), closely followed by XGBoost (0.896), while LightGBM provided an optimal balance between accuracy (0.875) and computational efficiency. Logistic Regression, though simpler, performed reasonably well (0.794). The Landsat-derived wildfire inventory comprised approximately 622,221 burned pixels and was subsequently split into a pre-2017 training set (72.8%) and a post-2017 testing set (27.2%) to evaluate model generalization over time. Spatial block cross-validation was applied to reduce spatial autocorrelation and enhance model generalization. This methodological framework, combining spatial and temporal validation, temporal hold-out, and spatial blocking, strengthens the robustness and reliability of wildfire susceptibility modeling. Interpretability analyses based on SHAP values, Gini importance, and permutation importance identified the contributions of underexplored variables, including vegetation type, soil type, and soil organic carbon (SOC). The resulting susceptibility maps provide valuable insights for spatial planning and ecosystem management, supporting evidence-based strategies to enhance environmental resilience and biodiversity conservation in Mediterranean landscapes.