Industrial Doctorate: Development of forest wildfire risk maps in real time using remote sensing techniques for the Comunidad de Madrid


Forest fires have become a pressing issue in today’s world due to the growing frequency and severity of these disasters. In response to this challenge, Quasar has launched an industrial PhD project to develop a fire risk model. The project awarded by the Industrial Doctorate program of the Comunidad de Madrid, is a collaboration between INIA and Quasar and will run for three years, between January 2023 and December 2025.

We have given the project the name: Risk4Fire.

The project will focus on estimating the Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) using high spatial and temporal resolution imagery from the Copernicus Program of the European Union. The developed models will be calibrated and verified with field data from the Autonomous Community of Madrid to ensure their reliability and transferability to other regions.

The project will also tackle:

  • Improving the estimation of live vegetable fuel moisture content avilable from satellite images using auxiliary ground data for calibration and validation.

  • Improving the monitoring of fire risks by identifying the moment in time in which a given area enters a high risk situation by exploiting the temporal dimension of the existing data.

  • Improving the detection of different resources of interest by exploiting the spatial dimension, evaluating the effectiveness of the algorithms and their dependence with the selection of the study area.

  • Transfering to the Research Center participating in the Proposal Quasar’s experience in remote sensing techniques, development of artificial intelligence algorithms and management of scientific platforms for the exploitation of large databases.

The ultimate goal of this project is to develop an operational and reliable monitoring system based on LFMC and spectral information that can facilitate near-real-time monitoring of wildfire risk, which can help mitigate the adverse effects of forest fires and protect the environment.

More on the development of applications for Wildfire monitoring being developed by Quasar can be found in this presentation,


SIMBAD WILDFIRE MONITORING
Presentation



This project receives funding from the Comunidad de Madrid Industrial Doctorate programme 2022 under reference number IND2022/BIO-23597.

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