Fire news management in the context of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS)

This is the authors' version of the work. The definitive version was published in the proceedings of "Quinta conferenza italiana sul software geografico e sui dati geografici liberi" (GFOSS DAY 2012), November 2012. http://www.gfoss.it/drupal/gfossday2012 <strong>Fire news management in the context of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS)</strong> Paolo Corti¹, Jesús San-Miguel-Ayanz¹, Andrea Camia¹, Daniel McInerney¹, Roberto Boca¹, Margherita Di Leo¹ ¹ European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via Fermi, 2749, I-21027 Ispra, Italy. <strong>Introduction.</strong> The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) has been established by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Directorate General for Environment (DG ENV) of the European Commission (EC) in close collaboration with the Member States and neighbor countries. EFFIS is intended as complementary system to national and regional systems in the countries, which provides harmonized information required for international collaboration on forest fire prevention and fighting and in cases of trans-boundary fire events. It provides updated information before (fire danger forecast), during (burnt area perimeters, hot spots) and after (damage assessments, erosion, emission, dispersion) forest fires, harmonized at the EU level, enhancing international cooperation (e.g., by aerial fire fighting) and supporting decision making. The system is built using Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), and the current (2012) implementation is based on frameworks such as Django, OpenLayers, jQuery, MapServer, MapProxy, GDAL, PostgreSQL and PostGIS. All the datasets available in the EFFIS map viewer are also published through interoperable Web services (OGC WMS/WFS/WCS) and supplied with an open data license. The process of geoparsing, collecting and managing fire news, together with the management of the MODIS hot spots, is a vital task for the operation of the EFFIS, in order to identify fire burnt area perimeters and is performed daily during fire season by the EFFIS operators. To this aim, the FireNews EFFIS module, a web based application integrated within the EFFIS portal, is a toolset which provides automatic geoparsing and simplifies the management of the fire news collected by the operator.