Pinpointing spatio-temporal interactions in wildfire patterns

The spatial and spatio-temporal patterns of wildfire incidence and their relationship to various geographical and environmental variables are analyzed. Such relationships may be treated as components in particular point process models for wildfire activity. We show some of the techniques for the analysis of point patterns that have become available due to recent developments in point process modeling software. These developments permit convenient exploratory data analysis, model fitting, and model assessment. The discussion of these techniques is conducted jointly with and in the context of the analyses of a collection of data sets which are of considerable interest in their own right. These data sets consist of the complete records of wildfires occurred in Catalonia (north-eastern Spain) during the years 2004-2008.