SAFERS
Overview
In order to support societies becoming more resilient when acting against forests fires, the Horizon 2020-funded project SAFERS, ‘Structured Approaches for Forest Fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies’, is going to create an open and integrated platform featuring a forest fire Decision Support System.
The platform will 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.
Such Big Data will be 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 will suggest best practices according to the emergency phase and to the current situation using a semantic knowledge base.
The Background
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.
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.
The SAFERS Partnership
SAFERS project officially started on October 2020 for a period of 3 years (2020-2023) and with a budget of 3.25 million euros. It is coordinated by LINKS foundation and brings together 14 partners coming from seven European countries: Italy, Greece, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, France and Spain. The SAFERS Project partnership is:
- Fondazione LINKS Leading Innovation & Knowledge for Society (LINKS)
- Centro Internazionale in Monitoraggio Ambientale – Fondazione CIMA (CIMA)
- Ethniko Kentro Erevnas Kai Technologikis Anatyxis (CERTH)
- Ilmatieen Laitos – Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)
- Riscognition GmbH (RISC)
- Stevenson Astrosat Limited (ASTROSAT)
- WaterView S.r.l. (WV)
- ALPHA Consultants (UK) Ltd. (ALPHA)
- Unite Technique du SEMIDE Geie (SEM)
- Fundacio d’Ecologia del Foc i Gestio d’Incendias Pau Costa Alcubierre – Pau Costa Foundation (PCF)
- CSI Piemonte (CSI)
- Service Départemental d’Incendie et de Secours de Haute-Corse (SIS2B)
- Hellenic Rescue Team /Elliniki Omada Diasosis (HRT)
- Ministry of National Defence, Greece (HMOD)
Astrosat’s Role in the SAFERS Project
Astrosat’s contribution to SAFERS Project is to lead the development of the ‘web-based platform for decision support’ (WP4) of SAFERS. They are also leading work related to ‘Early marketing & business development’.
SAFERS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
