Our project consortium will gather in the city of Lleida, Spain for the 5th Plenary Meeting between March the 27th and 29th. The meeting will provide our project partners with the opportunity to exchange information and assess the progress towards better European wildfire management. The aim is to cover all relevant aspects of the FirEUrisk approach during the 3-day gathering and share valuable updates on our multi-perspective take on fire risk.

We look forward to productive and engaging discussions, and to advancing our collective goal of reducing wildfire risk in Europe. Stay tuned for updates on our progress through our Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

In recognition of the importance of wildfire research and innovation, a special session dedicated to wildfires will be held as a part of Splitech conference and chaired by FirEUrisk partners. This 8th edition of Splitech – International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies will take place in Split and Bol, Croatia June 20-23, 2023. The aim of The Wildfires track is to bring together the wildfire research community and provide opportunities to present and discuss new innovations in conceptual, technical and computational methods and solutions in wildfire management. All accepted papers will be published in IEEE Explore indexed proceedings.

Final deadline for full paper submission is March 13 2023. Submit your paper here.

In this webinar, organised on March 14th at 11-14 a.m. CET, three European projects working on wildfire risk management come together to exchange knowledge regarding fire risk reduction. Researchers from the LIFE RESILIENT FORESTS, VESPRA and FirEUrisk projects present different perspectives related to landscape and vulnerability management. The presentation titles are:

• “Coupling water, fire and climate resilience with biomass production from forestry to adapt watersheds to climate change” by María González Sanchis, Technical University of Valencia (UPV)
• “Planning and response operations to wildfires, floods and industrial accidents based on the vulnerability” by Luis Torres, Meteogrid and Miguel Almeida, ADAI
• “Addressing fire risk through land management: Exploring opportunities and trade-offs in Europe through spatial analysis and land-use modelling” by Alex Neidermeier, Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Register for the free event here

The Wildland Urban Areas (WUI) where human settlements border with patches of flammable vegetation make up interfaces exposed to high wildland fire risk. In the past two decades, considerable effort has been made in identifying these high-risk locations, following different mapping approaches and concepts. In this webinar, hosted by Prof. Avi Bar-Massada from the University of Haifa, Israel, attendees will learn the current state-of-the-art in WUI mapping, discussing the rationale behind different mapping approaches, the pros-and-cons of each strategy and its data requirements. Participants will view an example of mapping the WUI in a single demonstration region and acquire knowledge to create WUI maps for their region of interest, so that they can contribute to better fire management and policies aimed at reducing fire risk to human lives and property.

This training will take place on February the 22nd and is intended for graduate and PhD students, researchers, and other actors involved in wildfire risk management. For more information you can check the details on the training agenda. If you’re interested in attending, please complete the registration form. The deadline closes on February the 16th.

Accurate and spatially explicit information on forest fuels is essential for designing integrated fire risk management strategies, as fuel characteristics are critical for fire danger estimation, fire propagation, and emissions modelling. The first FirEUrisk training, delivered by Elena Aragoneses from the University of Alcalá, Spain, will give an overview of the project’s new fuel classification system, providing attendees with the knowledge and tools necessary to use it and explore the related European fuel map to assess fire risk in Europe. Data access and tools to analyse the dataset, along with examples of potential usage, will also be presented to help attendees adapt the FirEUrisk classification system to different spatial scales and different purposes.

This training will take place on February the 2nd (10h-12h CET) and is intended for graduate and PhD students, researchers, and other actors involved in wildfire risk management. For detailed information you can check the training agenda. And if you’re interested in attending, please complete the registration form. The deadline closes on January the 26th.

Our project consortium will gather once more, at our 4th plenary meeting between October 10th and 11th in the vibrant city of Dresden, Germany. After a summer of unprecedented forest fires all over Europe, we’ll get together to assess our progress and share valuable updates.

On the 12th we will gather for a Symposium with leading European fire experts, to exchange data and insights into the new reality of forest fires in Central Europe. For the first time, we’ll connect with fire researchers, forestry experts, and fire brigades, to share our project’s technological development towards assessment, mitigation, and adaptation to fire risks. If you’re interested in attending, please send an email to christopher.marrs@tu-dresden.de to register for the event.

We are looking forward to meeting all the partners and participants, both online and in person. Stay tuned for updates from our social media channels!

Our partners from GMV presented FirEUrisk at the Terraenvision conference in Utretcht, The Netherlands, during the session “NH1: FirEurisk: paradigm shifts in fire management” on the 28th of June. Our project was also featured in the events’ poster sessions.

This online event brings together 8 European projects – FirEUrisk included – working amongst wildfire risk management to discuss possibilities for cooperation, ensure coherence and complementarity between their demonstration activities and harmonise their communication activities.

Project partners, end-users and collaborating wildfire-related initiatives will gather at our hybrid annual plenary meeting between March 30th and April 1st in the beautiful city of Coimbra, Portugal to cover all relevant aspects of our project´s wildfire management strategy. Stay tuned for updates from our social media channels!

An open event where partners from our project and from Respond-A came together to explore avenues for collaboration and provide holistic solutions for wildfire management and first responders’ safety and health.

After the very violent fires of 2107 which caused 116 fatalities in Portugal, the country reacted proposing an extensive set of reforms that included the creation of a coordinating agency, modifications in several government agencies, detailed definition of the role of the various stakeholders, including the citizens, and the launching of an operative programme with several sectoral and transverse actions to prepare better the country for future events. This webinar promotes a reflection on the case of Portugal, to understand the philosophy of the proposed changes, their implementation and to have an assessment on their effectiveness, five years after the fires of 2017.

2021 was marked by numerous large wildfires around the Mediterranean, which burned hundreds of thousand hectares of land, claimed the life of several citizens and damaged a great number of infrastructures, including residential houses. In the FirEUrisk project, there are several ongoing studies concerning the more significant of these fires that occurred in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. In this webinar, material and results out of these studies were presented, giving greater emphasis to the fire episodes with direct impact on the wildland urban interface. The ultimate goal of these studies is to extract lessons from those tragic events, in order to provide learning opportunities that can prevent future tragedies in similar situations.

In this event moderated by FirEUrisk coordinator Domingos Viegas, Thomas Hickler from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and Goethe University presents an overview of the status and trends in biodiversity as well as major drivers of biodiversity change globally and in Europe, while exploring interactions between climate change, fire and biodiversity in different biomes. He also presents plans to simulate vegetation and fire dynamics in FirEUrisk, and discusses how the models can support policy and stakeholders. Kirsten Thonicke from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research gives an overview of recent findings on future changes in fire along with a summary of fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation models commenting on how research on climate impacts is standardised with climate and land-use scenarios to drive the model simulations and to analyse the multisectorial impacts.