Mesogeos: A multi-purpose dataset for data-driven wildfire modeling in the Mediterranean

(1) Orion Lab, IAASARS, National Observatory of Athens (2) Image & Signal Processing Group, Universitat de València Accepted at NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track

Abstract

We introduce mesogeos, a large-scale multi-purpose dataset for wildfire modeling in the Mediterranean. Mesogeos integrates variables representing wildfire drivers (meteorology, vegetation, human activity) and historical records of wildfire ignitions and burned areas for 17 years (2006-2022). It is designed as a cloud-friendly datacube, harmonizing all variables in a standard spatio-temporal grid of 1km x 1km x 1-day resolution. The datacube structure offers opportunities to assess machine learning (ML) usage in various wildfire modeling tasks. We extract two ML-ready datasets that establish distinct tracks to demonstrate this potential: (1) short-term wildfire danger forecasting and (2) final burned area estimation given ignition information. We define appropriate metrics and baselines to evaluate the performance of models in each track. By publishing the datacube, along with the code to create the datasets and models, we encourage the community to foster the implementation of additional tracks for mitigating the increasing threat of wildfires in the Mediterranean.

Leaderboard - Track A: Fire Danger Forecasting

Method Precision Recall F1 AUPRC
LSTM 0,798 0,788 0,793 0,856
Transformer 0,777 0,812 0,794 0,870
GTN 0,783 0,774 0,779 0,855

Leaderboard - Track B: Fire Burned Area Forecasting

Method CE AUPRC
U-Net (all variables) 0.0177 0.394
U-Net (only ignitions) 0.0166 0.418

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BibTeX


        @misc{kondylatos2023mesogeos,
        title={Mesogeos: A multi-purpose dataset for data-driven wildfire modeling in the Mediterranean}, 
        author={Spyros Kondylatos and Ioannis Prapas and Gustau Camps-Valls and Ioannis Papoutsis},
        year={2023},
        eprint={2306.05144},
        archivePrefix={arXiv},
        primaryClass={cs.CV}}