Project description
Enhancing our society's resilience against wildfires
Changing climate is increasing the risk of wildfires. As temperatures continue to soar in the future, scientists warn that extreme fires will become more common. Meaningful early warning forecasts, early identification and tracking as well as effective response are of paramount importance to save lives and contain environmental damage. The EU-funded SAFERS project will develop a complex emergency management system capable of acting along the whole emergency management cycle, thanks to the coupled use of heterogeneous Big Data, advanced models, and AI. Earth Observation data from Copernicus and GEOSS will be the primary data source, which will be combined with data from social media, smoke detectors, and mobile applications. This will allow first responders, citizens and decision makers to generate new and more accurate information, enhancing our society's resilience against wildfires.
Objective
Forest fires are exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, which are increasing both in frequency and in magnitude due to climate change effects. This points to the need for improving the effectiveness of emergency management solutions aimed to help society in becoming more resilient to emergencies arising before, during and after forest fire events. Therefore, it is proposed to realize a comprehensive Emergency Management System (EMS) that we name SAFERS: Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies. SAFERS will act along the key phases of the emergency management cycle, coupling information from EO data and services offered by Copernicus and GEOSS, crowdsourced data from social media and from specific applications that can be used by both citizens as well as from in-field professional agents, data generated by accurate sensors to detect smoke or fires. Advanced algorithm based on Artificial Intelligence will be used to generate risk maps and early warnings in the preparedness phase, estimate the forest fire extension and its propagation in function of the forecasted weather and soil conditions in the response phase, compute the impacts of an extinguished fire in terms of economic losses and monitor the soil recovery in the post-event phase.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligence
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
10138 Torino
Italy