Description
The concept of the project idea is the confluence point of two main aspects that if unified may generate great synergies, (i) the role of the forests to absorb and store CO2 and its adaptation to the Kyoto Protocol and (ii) forest biomass energy exploitation. For the time being there is no tool that takes both aspects into account, hence the main objective of the project is to develop a system that provides support in the preventive management of forest fires as well as decision support during operational forest fire management by including novel subsystems that integrate ecological and economic impact analysis. These actions will result in less dangerous fires that lead into a reduction of burned surface and reduction of CO2 emissions. During the project a probabilistic environmental and economic impact model will be developed. This model will perform massive simulations of forest fires in a given region taking into account different conditions and an analysis associated to a given fire.
Summary of project results
In the last decade, forest fire risk assessments have gained increased importance for strategic, operational and tactical decision making in fire management. The aim of this type of analysis is to statistically quantify the probability of occurrence of certain events together with their impact on the environment through the ensemble simulation of hundreds or thousands of independent fires with slightly perturbed input data. This may be used to compute burn probabilities and expected economical impact over a landscape given the uncertainty of the ignition locations, or to compute the expected risk of an ongoing fire given the uncertainty of future weather conditions or possible suppression measures. In all cases, high computer performance is required in order to obtain enough accurate results in acceptable times. The main goal of the project has been to develop a high performance platform able to do massive ensemble wildfire simulations for statistical forest fire risk assessments
Summary of bilateral results