Organised by the project coordinator LINKS, SAFERS project held its 2^nd General Assembly on the 7^th and 8^th October 2021 in a hybrid format, in which the progress of the project and the activities were shared and discussed within the consortium. In addition, a panel of external attendees and the members of the Advisory Board participated in the design review.

A general appreciation emerged for the good participation of both the consortium and a wide external audience in the early activities on Innovation co-design (WP2), despite being held during the pandemic. These activities generated a twofold output: on one side the activities allowed to produce a meaningful set of operationally-oriented requirements that have been engineered to drive the technical developments. On the other side, it has allowed us to build a common knowledge base of the context and actors, which is very useful for preparing the next piloting activities.

After the International User Requirements Workshop (IURW)* which was organised back in February, we started the design of the SAFERS Intelligent Services and Platform thanks to the many end-user requirements that were collected through co-design activities with many stakeholders.

Since then, the SAFERS technical partners have worked on translating these requirements into functionalities for each SAFERS Intelligent Service as well as for the integrated platform. 

In the framework of the Second General Assembly that will take place on the 7th of October, we would like to assess the preliminary SAFERS designs; gathering important feedbacks towards the next steps that will bring to the implementation of the α release of all SAFERS services, which is due for the first quarter of 2022.

SAFERS project will leverage the international standard Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) to enhance shared situational awareness and obtain better emergency warnings for the stakeholders involved in emergency management actions. 

The 2021 Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Implementation Workshop will be conducted as  an  online  Webinar on 13-14  October  from  13:00  to  17:15 CEST (Geneva time) each day followed by a Training on 15 October. Call-in instructions will be sent to all registered participants.

Everyone interested in emergency alerting is welcome including managers and technical staff at the governmental, non-governmental organizations  (NGOs) as well as the private sector, media, etc. CAP Implementation Workshops are technical meetings conducted in  English  without  interpretation. These meetings do not set policy;  they  are  intended solely for information sharing among experts. Accordingly, participants represent themselves and need not be formally  associated  with  organizations.

Registration is free of charge, but it is necessary to receive the required password for  the  video  conference. Further information is found on the  workshop website as well as  the event’s flyer.

SAFERS is going to create an open and integrated platform featuring a forest fire Decision Support System. This platform will integrate and use 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. SAFERS platform will offer several intelligent services:

1. Crowdsourcing intelligence for improved EO mapping – Social media analysis,
2. Mobile application /chatbot for citizens and volunteers (OS),
3. Sub-seasonal weather forecast,
4. Operational early-warning,
5. Smoke and fire detection systems,
6. On-demand nowcast and forecast models,
7. EO-based fire delineation and burned area mapping; and
8. EO-based post wildfire habitat recovery.

Read the description of these intelligent services on SAFERS website.

SAFERS first animated video is  available in 6 languages (subtitles): French, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish.

On February 24^th and 25^th, the SAFERS International User Requirements Workshop (IURW) was held in a virtual format with the purpose of identifying requirements and co-designing solutions for the development of SAFERS platform. The event was attended by around 90 participants who represented heterogenous profiles: wildfire specialists, mainly from across European countries, but also from North and South America and North Africa.