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Fire news management in the context of the European Forest Fire Information
System (EFFIS)
Paolo Corti, Jesus San Miguel,
Andrea Camia, Daniel McInerney,
Roberto Boca, Margherita Di Leo
www.jrc.ec.europa.eu
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JRC
The Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) is one of the seven scientific institutes of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Its mission is to provide scientific and technical support to EU policies for the protection of the European and global environment.
The IES is made up of eight Scientific Units (organigramme): * Water Resources Unit* Air and Climate Unit* Monitoring Agricultural Resources Unit* Land Resource Management Unit* Digital Earth & Reference Data Unit* Climate Risk Management Unit* Sustainability Assessment Unit* Forest Resources and Climate Unit (http://forest.jrc.ec.europa.eu/)
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The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS)
* 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 neighbouring countries. Operation is currently co-financed by JRC, ENV and ECHO (Monitoring and Information Centre).
* It supports the services in charge of the protection of forests against fires in EU and neighbouring countries, and provides the EC services and the European Parliament with information on forest fires in Europe.
* Aims at providing up-to-date, reliable information on forest fires at the pan-European scale, providing European level assessments during both pre-fire and post-fire phases, thus supporting fire prevention, preparedness, fire fighting and post-fire evaluations.
* EFFIS is intended as a complementary system to national and regional fire information 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.
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Forest fires in Europe
Every year:65,000 fires on average.
500,000 hectares burned.Casualties and heavy economic
impact.
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http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
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Provides information before fire (danger forecast)
during fire (fire detection, burned area rapid mapping)
after fire (land cover damage assessment, forest fire emissions, potential soil erosion)
http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
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Models, data integration, analysisWind speed
FIRE WEATHER INDEX (FWI)
Fine Fuel Moisture Code (FFMC)
Duff Moisture Code (DMC)
Drought Code (DC)
INITIAL SPREAD INDEX (ISI)
BUILD UP INDEX (BUI)
Wind speed
FIRE WEATHER INDEX (FWI)
Fine Fuel Moisture Code (FFMC)
Duff Moisture Code (DMC)
Drought Code (DC)
INITIAL SPREAD INDEX (ISI)
BUILD UP INDEX (BUI)
vvv
v ECBA ×××= ∑2CO
Regional estimates of CO2 emissions
Burned area vs Monthly Severity Rating in EUMed(June to October 1985-2005)
y = 2199.1e0.4099x
R2 = 0.7551
-
50,000
100,000
150,000
200,000
250,000
300,000
350,000
400,000
450,000
500,000
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
MSR
Mon
thly
bur
ned
area
(ha)
Av burned area (m2)
Bv biomass (g m-2)
C burning efficiency (g g-1)
Evemission coefficient for CO2
Remote sensing
Weather forecast
DatabasesDataData
Data
Geo-datasets
Input
Fire Danger Forecast
Active Fire Detection
Fire Monitoring
Damage Assessment
Fire Emissions
Post-fire Soil Erosion
Fire News
Output
WEB interface atWEB interface at((http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.euhttp://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu))
EFFIS Summary
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http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
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The fire news application
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The process
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Quick facts
* a web application for geoparsing and analyzing web feeds to identify forest fires news
* has replaced a semi manual process built on top of Google Reader, Google Maps and GDAL scripts
* the news are always verified by manual intervention before being published (but work flow can be different)
* the application is used in the context of forest fires, but can be used for other aims (just use the generic geofeeds application, on which the FireNews application is based)
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
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Work flow
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for filtering in and out feed items
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for filtering in and out feed items
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for filtering in and out feed items
4. For each feed the user can add a series of countries/places for filtering in and out geoparsed feed items
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for filtering in and out feed items
4. For each feed the user can add a series of countries/places for filtering in and out geoparsed feed items
5. Feed items are then displayed from the web application (with eventual geoparsed places)
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Work flow
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Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for filtering in and out feed items
4. For each feed the user can add a series of countries/places for filtering in and out geoparsed feed items
5. Feed items are then displayed from the web application (with eventual geoparsed places)
6. User can archive uninteresting feed items or can promote and tag feed items for important forest fire news items
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Work flow
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What's behind
* the application is developed in Django (Python)
* datastore is PostGIS (--> Spatialite, Oracle Spatial or NoSQL database)
* supports RSS (from 0.90 to 2.0) and Atom (0.3, 1.0) via Universal Feed Parser
* geoparse of feed is performed via Yahoo! Placemaker or via a custom implementation based on GeoNames
* geocode is performed via Google Maps, GeoNames and Yahoo! Maps via GeoPy
* fire news are eventually exposed as GeoRSS, KML and Shapefile by the application
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EFFIS VGI integration
* It is possible to integrate VGI (still via RSS feeds, filtering per user/keywords) * Twitter * Flickr * YouTube * others
* Example: twitter rss feed per "forest fire" keyword: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=forest+fire
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Sm@rtFeeds
* Sm@rtFeeds: https://github.com/capooti/smartfeeds
* This is the web application engine used and customized in the context of the FireNews application
* Still at a very early stage of development
* It can be used for any context: disaster management, crisis, news, brand monitoring, trends analysis, just as a different smart aggregator. Whenever you need useful information from massive amounts of data
* Works for now just with RSS feeds. Willing to implement the SMS and Email feeds
* A Python alternative to Ushahidi SwiftRiver
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