Application: During 2013 the JRC has developed a dedicated web client for fire monitoring in protected areas. The tool was especially designed to support people working in conservation and park management. It helps understanding the fire ecology of a protected area and the possible threats and pressures. Threats like poaching or conflicts (inside or outside the park) can be identified because they often cause fire, deliberately or by accident. The tool can be also a valuable mean to improve and verify the fire management plans in the protected area. More generally it allows to characterize the fire regimes as well as their alteration in time. For any inquires about the Fire Monitoring Tool please contact us at: pa-fires@jrc.ec.europa.eu Datasets used in the tool The tool is a web client that provides historical and near-real time information about fire activity derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) burned area and active fire products [2, 3]. The MODIS products are distributed by NASA FIRMS [4] and the University of Maryland and cover more than a decade, from late 2000 to present. We assess fire activity using two types of information: - fire occurrence (location and timing of active fires)
- burned area extent.
The user can select a protected area from the countries (Africa, Caribbean and Pacific) of the ACP region and choose a period of time. For each selection the tool produces, on the fly, graphs, tables and maps of the fire activity. The content and its graphical representation have been designed to provide a synthesis of the fire activity by season and by vegetation classes. We update the information of fire occurrence daily and we distribute it 48 hours after the satellite acquisition. The burned areas information becomes available 1-2 months after the satellite observation because it requires a longer processing. The maps of fire occurrence, fire density and burned area can be downloaded and used in a GIS environment or as simple images. We focus on protected areas but we provide also information on their immediate surroundings (a buffer area of 25km around the park) to understand how they relate to each other. The difference in the fire density observed inside and outside a protected area is used as an indicator of the protected area's ecological condition in comparison to its context. Languages: The Fire Monitoring Tool for Protected Areas is available in English, French, Spanish. Released: 2013 Requirements: The Fire Monitoring Tool for Protected Areas cannot be used for commercial purposes and is optimized for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Access: http://firetool.jrc.ec.europa.eu |