National wildfire risk cartography

Hazard, vulnerability and risk maps for continental Chile at 10 m resolution, adapting the EU’s wildfire risk method to Chilean data.

Organisation: CONAF
Role: Member of the GIS analysis team
Period: 2024
Services: GIS analysis
Remote sensing
Links: CONAF’s page on the analysis (in Spanish)

Map of the Ñuble region coloured by the ecological value of fuel, from blue for non-combustible areas through green and yellow to orange and red for the most valuable fuel types, concentrated in the Andean foothills around the Nevados de Chillán. — Ecological vulnerability, fuel value component, Ñuble region. One of the intermediate layers behind the national risk index.

CONAF’s 2024 National Forest Fire Risk Analysis updates the 2021 study with one standardised method for the whole country, so regions can be compared and resources prioritised on the same basis. I was one of a five-person team, working across the full analytical chain.

Method

Adapted the Joint Research Centre’s pan-European wildfire risk methodology to Chilean conditions and data.
Worked with regional and central fire prevention teams to redefine the hazard and vulnerability variables.
Weighted the variables through structured expert surveys and a Delphi-method matrix.
Compiled and standardised official national coverages into 10 m rasters (WGS84 UTM 19S) for continental Chile.
Built the hazard and vulnerability layers by multicriteria evaluation in ArcGIS Pro, then derived the national risk index and split it by region for statistics.

Result

A single national layer that CONAF uses to identify critical areas and plan prevention and control, with statistics for every region of the country.