S2IGI: AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM FOR FOREST FIRES MANAGEMENT

Forest fires are one of the main sources of threat and degradation of vegetated and anthropicareas in the Mediterranean Basin. In the last decade, Italy experienced about 5500 forest firesper year, which burned about 50.000 hectares per year, although a high interannual variabilitycharacterizes this phenomenon. Supporting wildland fire prevention and management is thekey objective of the S2IGI (Sistema Satellitare Integrato Gestione Incendi) project, whichaims to provide a short and medium term forecasting of wildfire danger, an early detection ofwildland fires, a real-time forecast of wildland fire propagation, and an assessment of firedamages, based on the use of advanced technologies as Earth observation (EO) dataexploitation.In more detail, the main goal of S2IGI is the development of added-value products based onsatellite images, weather numerical predictions and in-situ ancillary data, together with adedicated decision support system. Therefore, S2IGI can support the wildland firemanagement activities along the following three phases: (1) forecast and prevention,(2) monitoring, detection and suppression, (3) damage assessment and vegetationrecovery.The products delivered by this project derive from previous EU and national RTD projects, inwhich, for many years, the project partners have been involved; the same products have beenextensively evaluated during the training and the demonstration period of the past projects.Crowd sourcing data will be also tested as additional source of information during theemergency phases.S2IGI project is being developed encompassing the following main principles:a) to define, make and demonstrate a functional architecture, accounting for all types ofoperational scenarios of fire-related emergencies at local, regional and national level,respectively;b) to customize and implement into the system the whole set of unsupervised, fire-orientedEO techniques prioritizing the exploitation of the Copernicus data and products;c) to explore, test, and implement into the system innovative unsupervised techniques andalgorithms for fire detection and burn scar mapping;d) to provide the overall system with relevant, quantitative decision support functionalities, asthe near-real-time straightforward modeling of fires in controlled environments under knownboundary conditions.This paper is devoted to introduce the S2IGI pilot project, and to describe the main productsand the related validation methods. S2IGI is a three years lasting project supported bythe Regional Administration of Sardinia under the POR (Programma OperativoRegionale) FESR (Fondo Europeo di Sviluppo Regionale) Sardegna 2014- 2020.