Assessing Response Disparities in California Wildland-Urban-Interface (WUI) Cities Using the Compartmental Model

TL;DR

This study analyzes social media data to assess public responses to wildfires in California's WUI areas, revealing geographic and socio-economic disparities in awareness and resilience, which inform targeted wildfire management strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of transformer-based topic modeling and SIR modeling to quantify wildfire response awareness and resilience from social media data in California.

Findings

Southern California with larger Hispanic populations shows higher wildfire awareness and resilience.

Urbanized regions in Central and Northern California have lower awareness levels.

Higher unemployment rates are associated with reduced resilience in southern regions.

Abstract

The increasing frequency and severity of wildfires pose significant risks to communities, infrastructure, and the environment, especially in Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas. Effective disaster management requires understanding how the public perceives and responds to wildfire threats in real-time. This study uses social media data to assess public responses and explores how these responses are linked to city-level community characteristics. Specifically, we leveraged a transformer-based topic modeling technique called BERTopic to identify wildfire response-related topics and then utilized the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model to compute two key metrics associated with wildfire responses - awareness and resilience indicators. Additionally, we used GIS-based spatial analysis to map wildfire locations along with four groups of city-level factors (racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, demographic, and wildfire-specific). Our findings reveal significant geographic and socio-spatial differences in public responses. Southern California cities with larger Hispanic populations demonstrate higher wildfire awareness and resilience. In contrast, urbanized regions in Central and Northern California exhibit lower awareness levels. Furthermore, resilience is negatively correlated with unemployment rates, particularly in southern regions where higher unemployment aligns with reduced resilience. These findings highlight the need for targeted and equitable wildfire management strategies to improve the adaptive capacity of WUI communities.