Burn probability maps are made by simulating very large numbers of fires: ignitions scattered according to a historical pattern, each grown under weather drawn from a record of past seasons, until every cell has been burned in some fraction of the simulations. A cell reading \( 0.02 \) burned in two per cent of the simulated seasons. It does not mean a two per cent chance that this cell burns today, and it says nothing about the fire currently in front of you. Read it the way you read a flood map: a long-run frequency under stated assumptions. Those assumptions are the whole content, so a published map must carry them — how many ignitions and from what distribution, which years of weather, which fuel layer and which year it represents, and whether suppression was simulated at all. Change the ignition density and every number changes proportionally. The confusion resolved is treating a planning product as an operational one, which is the fastest way to lose a community's trust when a cell with a low value burns. After this Concept you can read a burn probability map correctly and state the assumptions any such map must be published with.
Landscape burn probability modeling is a stochastic simulation method within quantitative wildfire risk assessment that estimates the likelihood and intensity of fire at each landscape pixel by repea…