Examining the Relationship Between Fire Hazard and Burn Severity for the Beachie Creek and Lionshead Wildfires

Wildfires pose a threat to human life, infrastructure, and natural resources. Fighting wildfires puts lives in danger and requires considerable resources. The Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires that burned through the Santiam Canyon, Oregon in 2020 are excellent examples of the damage wildfires can inflict. Both fires began August 16, 2020 and burned nearly 400,000 combined acres, devastating local communities before being contained at the end of October 2020. The purpose of our research is to examine these fires to test for a relationship between fire hazard and burn severity. Our research had three major phases. Phase one was to use Landsat 8 OLI imagery and existing geospatial datasets to construct a pre-fire fire-hazard model. Phase two consisted of fieldwork involving the collection of Composite Burn Index data at various locations within the fire perimeter, as well as the collection of drone imagery in burned areas. Phase three consisted of constructing our own burn severity models using Landsat 8 OLI imagery. The data collected during the fieldwork was used to calibrate burn severity indices to estimate the degree of burning on the landscape. Finally, we compared our fire hazard model to our burn severity models to determine if a relationship exists between fire hazard and burn severity. We found that our “Normal Equation”fire hazard model did a reasonably good job of predicting burn severity, with a 71%of accuracy. The most accurately predicted category of burn severity was “Moderate”, while the least accurate was “Low”.