Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Wildfire Occurrence Hotspots and Socio-Environmental Predictors in the Atebubu Amantem District, Ghana

The recent surge of fire outbreaks have jeopardized the socioeconomic status of several individuals as well as degraded the biodiversity, specifically in the Atebubu Amantem district and in Ghana in general. However, scientific research effort to assessing and eliciting crucial information for optimized preventive resources allocation and management is limited. This study therefore utilised a 10 year wildfire ignition points data supplied by the Fire Information for Resource Management Systems (FIRMS) to model the fire occurrence and intensity, through the Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and Getis-Ord G* hotspots analysis. Regression models were also adopted to evaluate the relationship between fire occurrence and certain social, environmental, topographic and climatic variables. Results indicate that, fire occurrence shows a rising trend since 2017 in the district, and the spatial pattern has been fairly consistent over the past 10 years. With respect to factors driving the wildfire occurrence, temperature (R2=0.1819, p=0.0086), solar radiation (R2=0.1868, p=0.0045), elevation (R2= -0.12, p=0.0253) and distance between settlement from wildlands (R2=0.0691, p=0.0412) were significantly correlated with fire occurrence in the district.