All reports on the state of Europe’s forests indicate that the broad Mediterranean area is systematically affected by uncontrolled forest fires with large impact on ecosystems, soil erosion, slope instability, desertification trends, and local economies as a whole, whit a negative mid-to-long term prospect because of Climate Change. In this scenario, the need to improve the information and the intelligence support to forest fire prevention is widely recognized to be relevant. Fire prevention is still the most cost-effective strategy when compared to firefighting and extinguishing that are costly, local, and triggered only in response to already ongoing crises
PREFER
Financing: European Community's Seventh Framework Programme ([FP7/2007e2013]) under G. A. nr. 312931.
Target: Wildfires
The main purpose of the FP7 PREFER project is to set up a space-based service infrastructure and up-to-date cartographic products, based on remote sensing data, to support the preparedness, prevention, recovery and reconstruction phases of the Forest Fires emergency cycle in the European Mediterranean Region
The products developed were based on the exploitation of data from the Copernicus space
infrastructure, and the integration of different data types from a variety of sources, such as earth observation, digital terrain models, socioeconomic data, meteorological data and in-situ data
A set of cartographic tools in Mediterranean Europe:
Preparedness/prevention service phase: Fuel map, fuel reduction map, prescribed fire map, daily fire hazard map, seasonal fire hazard map, vulnerability map and economic value, seasonal risk map.
Recovery/reconstruction service phase: Post-fire recovery vegetation map, damage severety map, 3D fire vegetation volume loss map, burned scar map
Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece
