# CanadaFireSat: Toward high-resolution wildfire forecasting with multiple modalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08690/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
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- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04612/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08051/) (2022)
- [SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07113/) (2023)
- [BigEarthNet: A Large-Scale Benchmark Archive For Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06148/) (2019)
- [Seasonal Contrast: Unsupervised Pre-Training from Uncurated Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16607/) (2021)
- [GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16020/) (2023)
- [On Embeddings for Numerical Features in Tabular Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05556/) (2022)
- [SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17179/) (2023)
- [More Diverse Means Better: Multimodal Deep Learning Meets Remote Sensing Imagery Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05457/) (2020)
- [Hyperbolic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05898/) (2022)
- [Deep Hierarchical Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14335/) (2022)
- [AnySat: One Earth Observation Model for Many Resolutions, Scales, and Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14123/) (2024)
- [A review of machine learning applications in wildfire science and management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00646/) (2020)
- [Decoupling the Role of Data, Attention, and Losses in Multimodal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00529/) (2021)
- [Evaluation of post-hoc interpretability methods in time-series classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05656/) (2022)
- [Next Day Wildfire Spread: A Machine Learning Data Set to Predict Wildfire Spreading from Remote-Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02447/) (2021)
- [Visual Explanations of Image-Text Representations via Multi-Modal Information Bottleneck Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17174/) (2023)
- [ProtoSeg: Interpretable Semantic Segmentation with Prototypical Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12276/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Canada experienced in 2023 one of the most severe wildfire seasons in recent history, causing damage across ecosystems, destroying communities, and emitting large quantities of CO2. This extreme wildfire season is symptomatic of a climate-change-induced increase in the length and severity of the fire season that affects the boreal ecosystem. Therefore, it is critical to empower wildfire management in boreal communities with better mitigation solutions. Wildfire probability maps represent an important tool for understanding the likelihood of wildfire occurrence and the potential severity of future wildfires. The massive increase in the availability of Earth observation data has enabled the development of deep learning-based wildfire forecasting models, aiming at providing precise wildfire probability maps at different spatial and temporal scales. A main limitation of such methods is their reliance on coarse-resolution environmental drivers and satellite products, leading to wildfire occurrence prediction of reduced resolution, typically around ~ 0.1deg. This paper presents a benchmark dataset: CanadaFireSat, and baseline methods for high-resolution: 100 m wildfire forecasting across Canada, leveraging multi-modal data from high-resolution multi-spectral satellite images (Sentinel-2 L1C), mid-resolution satellite products (MODIS), and environmental factors (ERA5 reanalysis data). Our experiments consider two major deep learning architectures. We observe that using multi-modal temporal inputs outperforms single-modal temporal inputs across all metrics, achieving a peak performance of 60.3% in F1 score for the 2023 wildfire season, a season never seen during model training. This demonstrates the potential of multi-modal deep learning models for wildfire forecasting at high-resolution and continental scale.