Advanced Systems for Prevention and early detection of forest fires „ASPires“

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Recently a lot of projects (including EU projects) have been started in computer-based forest fires early detection and monitoring, and are usually implemented in areas of particular importance (National Parks).

However, forest fires still present one of the main risk, and its detection in early phase remains one of the biggest challenge for researchers and institutions in Crisis Management Systems in Europe.

The project will develop a novel model of an information systems for early detection, monitoring and prediction of forest fires in areas of particular importance, providing high fire danger forecast and prediction.

The goal of the project is to develop advanced concepts for early detection systems of forest fires that integrates sensor networks and mobile (drone) technologies for data collection and acquisition of those data at existing Crisis Management Information Systems (CMIS).

The mobile (drone) technologies will allow to cover much larger areas in order to raise the percentage of forest fires detections in area of particular importance, to monitor area with high fire weather index, and to monitor areas already affected by forest fires.

Furthermore, our project will calculate the probability of forest fires in certain areas, and will allow its integration in existing European CMIS.

Although initially implemented in our test bed in Macedonia and in our end-users Bulgarian Ministry of Interior and German Bundesministerium das Innern, our system will be open and available to all European countries.

This system will help all CMIS in Europe to develop and to implement different methodologies for initial stage warning, localization and organization of the firefighting teams and tactics to suppress the disaster.

Existed monitoring system of forest fires have the disadvantage of relatively low percentage of detecting of forest fires (between 23.5% – 30%). In our opinion, the main reason for this is that existing stationary systems cannot cover all areas of interest, especially in those where Fire Weather Index (FWI) is very high or the FWI is changing and Hot Spots may appear on different area.

The here proposed system based on mobile devises (drones) can solve this problem.