Prediction of Forest Fire Occurrence Risk in Heilongjiang Province Under Future Climate Change

Against the backdrop of climate change, forest fires increasingly undermine ecosystem stability and reshape species distributions in Heilongjiang Province. Therefore, quantifying the drivers of fire occurrence and conducting long-term fire risk forecasting holds critical value for regional ecological security. Centered on the forested regions of Heilongjiang Province, this study systematically assessed the relative contributions of multi-source factors—including topography, vegetation, and meteorological conditions—to fire occurrence and compared the predictive performance of three models: Deep Neural Network with Residual Connections (ResDNN), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Modeling results based on historical fire records indicated that the ResDNN model achieved the highest accuracy (85.6%). Owing to its robust nonlinear mapping capability, it performed better in capturing complex feature interactions than ANN and SVM. These results demonstrate its strong applicability to forest fire prediction in Heilongjiang Province. Building on these findings, the study employed the best-performing ResDNN model in conjunction with CMIP6 multi-model climate projections to simulate and map the spatiotemporal probability of forest fire occurrence from 2030 to 2070. The results provide an intuitive representation of long-term fire-risk trajectories under future climate scenarios and offer scientific support for regional fire prevention, monitoring, early-warning systems, and forest management under climate change.