Fire prevention by satellite

Mediterranean countries regularly experience uncontrolled forest fires, which result in considerable damage to the local ecosystem. Causes include the occurrence of wet and dry extremes, a shift in traditional land management practices and the coexistence of urban settlements in forests. The impacts of fires involve soil erosion, slope instability and desertification, which will be made worse in the future by the effects of climate change.

The PREFER project will help to improve the information and intelligence support available for forest fire prevention. Fire prevention continues to be the most cost-effective approach to combating wild fires. This compares with firefighting, which is costly, local in outlook and only triggered in response to an ongoing crisis.

Consortium members will establish a space-based information service that supports prevention/preparedness and recovery from forest fires in the EU Mediterranean region. They also plan to establish a cluster of research institutes, industries and small and medium-sized businesses to provide space-based services and products for forest fire emergency management.

Work conducted by PREFER will enhance the fire fighting ability of EU Mediterranean countries, comprising Greece, Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. Activities will be based on the exploitation of all available spaceborne sensors (and new spaceborne sensors available by 2020) for managing forest fire hazards.

Project partners will establish a regional service to process and distribute the information to end users. The information service will be based on a harmonised set of users' requirements. These requirements will take into account the different legal frameworks that exist in the participating countries. The interoperable service provision infrastructure will allow easy access to information and optimise the integration of Earth observation, meteorological and other data.

The success of the PREFER project will help to control the outbreak of wild fires in Europe's most heavily forested region, thereby protecting lives, properties and natural ecosystems.