WildFireCan-MMD: A Multimodal dataset for Classification of User-generated Content During Wildfires in Canada

Rapid information access is vital during wildfires, yet traditional data sources are slow and costly. Social media offers real-time updates, but extracting relevant insights remains a challenge. We present WildFireCan-MMD, a new multimodal dataset of X posts from recent Canadian wildfires, annotated across 13 key themes. Evaluating both Vision Language Models and custom-trained classifiers, we show that while zero-shot prompting offers quick deployment, even simple trained models outperform them when labelled data is available, by up to 23%. Our findings highlight the enduring importance of tailored datasets and task-specific training. Importantly, such datasets should be localized, as disaster response requirements vary across regions and contexts.