Exploitable results Validation of the PROMETHEUS forest fire management system Wildland fires are responsible for most damage and environmental impairment of forest ecosystems in the Mediterranean region. As a consequence, the current fire management policy is to fight fired aggressively in all cases, although most of the fires are caused by man himself. Since man isn't able to fight forest fires efficiently because of the huge amount of energy that they release, the modern fire management approach concerns ways to convert wildfire to a controllable form, its behaviour from unknown to predictable, and its effects from disastrous to affordable or even acceptable. PROMETHEUS is a fire management information system that uses the approach of setting management objectives according to the expected impact of the fire. It consists of six modules concerning prevention planning, fuel management, fire behaviour, fire suppression, fire impact to soil and fire impact to vegetation and ecosystems. Each module operates independently in a consultation or prediction mode providing assessments of the fire occurrence, regime and effects, as well as a component of an integrated system for fire prevention, planning and management. The PROMETHEUS system considers forest fire characteristics (fire intensity, residence time, energy release, etc) to be the link between presuppression measures, suppression techniques and post fire management. The fundamental characteristic of PROMETHEUS is the acceptance of fire as part of the ecosystem functions within the context of fire management. This means that PROMETHEUS aims to support a fire management approach in an integrated way instead of fire control or fire suppression. A number of decision support systems for wildfire management have been developed during the last decade, as result of research and development in the field of forest fire. The basic weakness of most of these systems is the pure evaluation of the modelling part and the lack of operational validation. PROMETHEUS is currently validated and operationally tested in five European countries, in order to tune both modelling and operational software according to the user needs. The PROMETHEUS system adopts a dedicated geographical information system (GIS) application platform fire management information system (FMIS) for the operational implementation and support of the forest fire management task. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
