Proof of Concept: Multi-Target Wildfire Risk Prediction and Large Language Model Synthesis

Current state-of-the-art approaches to wildfire risk assessment often overlook operational needs, limiting their practical value for first responders and firefighting services. Effective wildfire management requires a multi-target analysis that captures the diverse dimensions of wildfire risk, including meteorological danger, ignition activity, intervention complexity, and resource mobilization, rather than relying on a single predictive indicator. In this proof of concept, we propose the development of a hybrid framework that combines predictive models for each risk dimension with large language models (LLMs) to synthesize heterogeneous outputs into structured, actionable reports.

Extreme-value forest fire prediction A study of the Loss Function in an Ordinality Scheme

Wildfires are highly imbalanced natural hazards in both space and severity, making the prediction of extreme events particularly challenging. In this work, we introduce the first ordinal classification framework for forecasting wildfire severity levels directly aligned with operational decision-making in France. Our study investigates the influence of loss-function design on the ability of neural models to predict rare yet critical high-severity fire occurrences. We compare standard cross-entropy with several ordinal-aware objectives, including the proposed probabilistic TDeGPD loss derived from a truncated discrete exponentiated Generalized Pareto Distribution. Through extensive benchmarking over multiple architectures and real operational data, we show that ordinal supervision substantially improves model performance over conventional approaches. In particular, the Weighted Kappa Loss (WKLoss) achieves the best overall results, with more than +0.1 IoU (Intersection Over Union) gain on the most extreme severity classes while maintaining competitive calibration quality. However, performance remains limited for the rarest events due to their extremely low representation in the dataset. These findings highlight the importance of integrating both severity ordering, data imbalance considerations, and seasonality risk into wildfire forecasting systems. Future work will focus on incorporating seasonal dynamics and uncertainty information into training to further improve the reliability of extreme-event prediction.