SAFERS

Enhancing our society’s resilience against wildfires

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. Therefore, it is proposed to realize a comprehensive Emergency Management System (EMS) that we name SAFERS: Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies.

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.

PUBLICATIONS

  1. Masa, P.; Kintzios, S.; Vasileiou, Z.; Meditskos, G.; Vrochidis, S.; Kompatsiaris, I. A Semantic Framework for Decision Making in Forest Fire Emergencies. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 9065. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13169065 OPEN ACCESS
  2. P. Masa, G.Tzanetis, S. Kintzios, G. Meditskos, S. Vrochidis, I. Vourvachis, L. Nerantzis, I. Kompatsiaris, " Ontology-based technologies for disaster preparedness, response and recovery", in the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Civil Protection & New Technologies (SafeThessaloniki 2022), 29 September - 1 October 2022, Thessaloniki, Greece. OPEN ACCESS
  3. P. Masa, G. Meditskos, S. Kintzios, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "Ontology-based Modelling and Reasoning for Forest Fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies", 12th EETN Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN 2022), September 7-9 2022, Corfu, Greece.
  4. N. I. Dourvas, A. Papagianni, I. Koulalis, K. Ioannidis, S. Vrochidis and I. Kompatsiaris, "An early-warning system for fire spreading by monitoring simple climate conditions and combining Cellular Automata with Digital Twins” in IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Living Environment (MetroLivEn), 25-27 May, 2022, pp. 252-257, DOI:10.1109/MetroLivEnv54405.2022.9826950.
  5. P. Masa , G. Meditskos, A. Karakostas , S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "On the Use of Semantic Web Technologies for Forest Fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies", In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Security and Management (SAM'21), Las Vegas, USA, July 26-29, 2021. OPEN ACCESS