Remote Sensing of Defensible Space Compliance to Enhance Wildfire Preparedness

Climate change has fueled an increase in wildfire frequency and intensity in California, having profound impacts on communities across the state. The Santa Barbara County Fire Department (SBCFD) currently enforces defensible space regulations, which require homeowners to maintain a buffer zone around their homes free of combustible vegetation. These regulations mitigate the spread of wildfire to structures and allow firefighters to more safely defend homes. This project investigated the feasibility of using remotely sensed satellite imagery from Planet Labs in a machine learning model to determine property compliance with defensible space regulations. Our team determined that, at the imagery resolution currently available to us, our model cannot predict compliance at a reliable rate. In addition, because the fire department may not have full access to inspected properties, we suspect that some homes are mistakenly marked as compliant based on only the portion of the property visible from the street. Next steps for improving the model include using a training set with higher resolution imagery, manually classifying images as compliant and non-compliant, and continuing to add and remove variables from the training data. We also recommend the fire department provide explicit reasons for why a property was marked as compliant or non-compliant during their inspections. We hope these insights will provide researchers with the next steps to create a defensible space machine learning model and help SBCFD with future inspection efforts. 

Acknowledgements 

This project could not have been completed without the support and guidance of our faculty and capstone advisors, as well as our clients and other individuals. 

Faculty Advisor Dr. Mark Buntaine, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management 

Capstone Advisor Dr. Carmen Galaz García, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management 

Clients 

Dr. Sarah Anderson, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management 

Dr. Mark Buntaine, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management 

Dr. Cesar Martinez-Alvarez, UCSB Department of Political Science 

Santa Barbara County Fire Department 

Special Thanks 

Scott Safechuck, Public Information Officer, Santa Barbara County Fire Department 

Jon Jablonski, UCSB Library, DREAM Lab 

Cullen Molitor, Center for Effective Global Action & Environmental Markets Lab