Nearly 2 million records. That is the size of the fire database at the center of EFFIS, the European Forest Fire Information System, which holds individual burn records supplied by 22 countries. Everything else the system does is built on top of that archive.
According to the system’s own description, the European Commission set EFFIS up together with national fire administrations. The job is twofold: to help the services that protect forests from fire in EU and neighboring countries, and to give Commission departments and the European Parliament harmonized information on forest fires in Europe.
From expert network to Copernicus
The human side came first. Since 1998 EFFIS has leaned on a network of national experts, the Expert Group on Forest Fires, which is registered with the Commission’s Secretariat General. Today that group draws on experts from 43 countries across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
In 2015 the system became one of the components of the Emergency Management Services in the EU’s Copernicus program.
What the system does
EFFIS is a modular web mapping system. It offers near real-time and historical information on forest fires and on fire regimes across the same three regions, and it tries to follow a fire through its whole cycle, from the conditions before ignition to the damage afterward.
Starting from the pre-fire stage, its modules cover:
- fire danger assessment;
- rapid damage assessment, including active fire detection, fire severity and land cover damage;
- emissions assessment and smoke dispersion;
- potential soil loss assessment;
- vegetation regeneration.
A separate Fire News module collects reports about forest fires published online in any European language and places each one on a map. The first two modules above feed a “current situation” viewer, which shows near-real-time information for anyone who opens it.
Countries that want data the web services do not offer directly can use a request form on the EFFIS site.
The description does not say how often national authorities act on the maps, or how the 22 contributing countries compare with the 43 in the expert group. What it does lay out is the plumbing: a shared archive, a common set of tools and a standing group of national experts that has been working under the Commission since the late 1990s.
