To respond to this global challenge, the European Union funded project under the Horizon 2020 programme SAFERS ‘Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies’ is in a mission to support societies becoming more resilient across the key phases of the forest fires emergency management cycle. SAFERS is creating an integrated platform featuring a forest fire Decision Support System. The platform uses information from different sources: earth observations from Copernicus and GEOSS, fire sensors in forests, topographic data, weather forecasts and even crowdsourced data from social media and other apps that can be used by citizens and first responders to provide situational in-field information.
Such Big Data is processed using Artificial Intelligence algorithms to generate useful information: risk maps to better plan preparedness actions, early detection of active fires, fire propagation predictions, burned area and fire front delineation, impact assessment estimations, and habitat recovery maps. Moreover, the SAFERS Decision Support System suggests best practices according to the emergency phase (prevention and preparedness, detection and response, restoration and adaptation) and to the current situation using a semantic knowledge base.
SAFERS project officially started in October 2020 for a period of 3.5 years (2020-2024) and with a budget of 3.25 million euros. It is coordinated by LINKS foundation and brings together 14 partners coming from 7 European countries: Italy, Greece, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, France and Spain.
