In recent years the European Alps experienced higher temperatures, more heatwaves, and more severe wildfires. Improving fire danger assessment for these sensitive ecosystems is a core element of future-oriented fire management strategies in the face of climate change. While meteorological systems are common to predict fire danger in many countries, other factors such as vegetation, topography, lightning occurrence and human impact are generally not considered. We introduce an Integrated forest Fire Danger assessment System (IFDS) for the Alpine country Austria that includes i) daily fire weather index data, ii) a countrywide hazard map for fire ignition through human activities, iii) a lightning fire hazard map, iv) a high-resolution fuel type map, and v) a topography-based estimation of the fire hazard. The system was implemented as an online Web-GIS prototype. The objectives of this contribution are to describe the conceptual approach for the IFDS, to understand the predictive power of different data layers in fire danger rating and to identify potential improvements, especially regarding the role of vegetation and human influence. A first validation was done with 2018–2019 forest fire data. Some variants of the IFDS produced better overall prediction accuracy regarding forest fire ignitions compared to common fire weather indices. They typically performed relatively better when considering the number of false alerts as well. However, correlation between larger burned areas and higher index values was low. Conclusions for the implementation of the IFDS in other Alpine countries are discussed and recommendations for necessary and reliable datasets at high resolution are given.

近年来，欧洲阿尔卑斯山经历了更高的温度，更多的热浪和更严重的野火。面对气候变化，改进这些敏感生态系统的火灾危险评估是面向未来的火灾管理策略的核心要素。尽管气象系统在许多国家通常可以预测火灾危险，但通常不考虑其他因素，例如植被，地形，雷电发生和人为影响。我们为奥地利阿尔卑斯山国家引入了综合森林火灾危险评估系统（IFDS），其中包括：i）每日火灾天气指数数据； ii）通过人类活动引起的全国性火灾着火危害图； iii）雷电着火图； iv）高分辨率的燃料类型图，以及v）基于地形的火灾隐患估计。该系统被实现为在线Web-GIS原型。该文稿的目的是描述IFDS的概念方法，以了解不同数据层在火灾危险等级中的预测能力，并确定潜在的改进，尤其是在植被和人类影响方面。首次验证是通过2018-2019年森林火灾数据进行的。与常见火灾天气指数相比，IFDS的某些变体在森林火灾点火方面具有更好的整体预测准确性。当考虑错误警报的数量时，它们通常也表现相对较好。但是，较大的燃烧区域与较高的指数值之间的相关性较低。