Gernot Rücker

Yesterday, we have been awarded the prestigious Copernicus Masters DLR Environment and Health Challenge Price! The award ceremony took place during the European Space Week in Tallinn, Estonia.

This is what jury member Dr. Doris Klein (scientific coordinator of the DLR FireBird project) says about firemaps.net:

«Information about fire is relevant for many aspects – ranging from human security to ecosystem management. firemaps.net shows how remote sensing data can be transformed into fire information. By providing this information in a user friendly way to environmental managers, it enables them to make informed decisions and to reduce negative impacts from bush and savanna fires, such as greenhouse gas emissions or damages to trees.»

The Copernicus Masters are often called the “Space Oscars”. Receiving this prize makes us proud about what we already achieved so far and motivates us for the next steps and new features we are currently busily implementing. Thanks go to the jury and to DLR, the sponsors of the price, and thanks go to the European Commission for investing in observing planet Earth with the Sentinel satellite fleet! The Sentinel open data policy makes the development of services such as ours possible.

Discover firemaps.net at the 37^th International Symposium for Remote Sensing of Envrionment (ISRSE) in South Africa.

The 37th edition of ISRSE will convene in Tshwane, South Africa 8 to 12 May 2017. The theme is “Earth Observation for Development and Adaptation to a Changing World”.

This will be the second time in this millennium that the African continent will host ISRSE. The event takes place at a time of rapid development in the African space science and technology sector. We have been active on the African continent in recent projects supporting fire monitoring in Tanzania, in transfrontier National Parks in South Africa and Mozambique, and are currently supporting fire management in the World Heritage Site Comoé National Park in Ivory Coast. Have a look at our maps on over ten years of biomass burning and emissions data for South Africa here

Find out more on ISRSE37 on this external link.

Apart from presenting firemaps.net at our booth (number 23) at ISRSE, we report on our latest work in the wildfire session on Thursday 9^th May under the title “Analyzing fire behavior from space using high and medium resolution IR sensors”. More hot stuff is shown in our talk “detecting and analyzing gas flares using Sentinel 3 and FireBird” in the session on greenhouse gases on Wednesday 10^th March.

Story maps are a way of telling a story with the help of maps. Here is one on the FortMcMurray fire disaster, which has been classified as one of the costliest natural disasters to strike Cananda. Go to the map here.

While Spain is experiencing a record tourist season in 2016, it is also suffering a record year in forest and bush fires. And these make it to the (international) news more easily, when tourists and fires come together, as has happened in the Spanish province of Alicante near the beach resort of Benidorm. Hundreds of residents, and many tourists, had to be evacuated, as fires (probably ignited by arsonists) ravaged near the location of Javea.

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firemaps.net provides you with fire monitoring information from space.

We support fire management planning through information on burned area, fuel consumption, biomass burned and emissions of greenhouse gases and other smoke constituents, as well as on the timing of the fires. We derive this information from burned area datasets and from observations of the burning fires through infrared sensors such as MODIS.

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