The Relationship between Socioeconomic Factors at Different Administrative Levels and Forest Fire Occurrence Density Using a Multilevel Model

Abstract

Wildfires are among the main factors that disturb terrestrial ecosystems, landscapes, and the environment. Understanding the differences that the socioeconomic factors of different administrative levels have on fire occurrence remains critical to inform the driving function of ignition sources. In this study, we collected socioeconomic and land use data for 21 cities and 81 counties in the study area from 2001 to 2019 and applied a multilevel model to explore the relationship between wildfire occurrence density and the driving factors. We estimated the fixed and random effect of the factors at different levels and built three hierarchical linear models (HLMs) to quantify the impacts of socioeconomic drivers on wildfires. The results showed that the variance among cities contributed to 14.01% of the unexplained variation of random effects at the county level. At the county level, the densities of middle school student populations, gross domestic product (GDP), and impervious surface areas were significantly positively correlated with fire occurrence density. At the city level, GDP and its interaction with county-level factors were significantly negatively correlated with fire occurrence density. This study provides a new method and findings for the research of wildfire occurrence and risk.