ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Forest Fire Susceptibility Analysis with Remote
Sensing Data and Machine Learning Algorithms
using Region-based Datasets
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1
Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Faculty of Science, Department of Space Sciences
and Technologies, Çanakkale, Türkiye
2
Balıkesir Regional Directorate of Forestry, Balıkesir, Türkiye
3
Afyon Kocatepe University, Faculty of Engineering, Surveying Engineering, Afyonkarahisar, Türkiye
Submission date: 2025-11-04
Final revision date: 2025-12-15
Acceptance date: 2026-01-27
Online publication date: 2026-05-19
Corresponding author
Cihan Uysal
Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Faculty of Science, Department of Space Sciences
and Technologies, Çanakkale, Türkiye
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Forests are vital elements of terrestrial ecosystems and ensure the integrity and sustainability of
natural factors such as soil, water, and climate. Forest fires are one of the disasters that cause deterioration
of the ecosystem as well as social and economic impacts. In combating disasters, determining
pre-disaster risks and reducing disaster damage is the first stage of disaster management. In this study,
a dataset consisting of 679×14 rows and columns derived from 312 forest fire points between 2017
and 2022 was prepared. For the dataset, 13 independent variables were mapped with remote sensing and
geographic information systems techniques from satellite images and open-source data. Training and
prediction datasets were created by extracting values for all variables in each pixel. Feature relevance
was initially assessed using Mutual Information (MI), followed by model-specific interpretation using
SHAP values. Model performance was evaluated using confusion matrices and ROC-AUC analysis.
Machine learning algorithms, including Decision Trees, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Naive Bayes,
Random Forest, and XGBoost, were trained using a dataset split into 80% training and 20% testing.
At the end of the study, forest fire sensitivity maps were created with an accuracy rate of 96% using
the Random Forest and XGBoost algorithms, which were the most powerful models. Susceptibility
probabilities were rescaled to a percentage scale and classified into low, medium, and high categories
using a quantile-based approach. Results indicate that distance to roads and population density are
the most influential predictors, highlighting the dominant role of human activity in wildfire ignition.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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