Talk at the Italian GFOSS Day Conference 2012 in Turin: An introduction to the European Forest Fire System Fire News tool, based on the Sm@rtFeed engine

1. Fire news management in the context of
the European Forest Fire Information
System (EFFIS)
Paolo Corti,
Jesus San Miguel,
Andrea Camia,
Daniel McInerney,
Roberto Boca,
Margherita Di Leo
www.jrc.ec.europa.eu
November 12, 2012 1

2. JRC
The Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) is one of the seven scientific
institutes of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Its mission
is to provide scientific and technical support to EU policies for the protection of the
European and global environment.
The IES is made up of eight Scientific Units (organigramme):
* Water Resources Unit
* Air and Climate Unit
* Monitoring Agricultural Resources Unit
* Land Resource Management Unit
* Digital Earth & Reference Data Unit
* Climate Risk Management Unit
* Sustainability Assessment Unit
* Forest Resources and Climate Unit (http://forest.jrc.ec.europa.eu/)
November 12, 2012 2

3. The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS)
* The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) has been established by
the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Directorate General for Environment
(DG ENV) of the European Commission (EC) in close collaboration with the
Member States and neighbouring countries. Operation is currently co-financed
by JRC, ENV and ECHO (Monitoring and Information Centre).
* It supports the services in charge of the protection of forests against fires in
EU and neighbouring countries, and provides the EC services and the European
Parliament with information on forest fires in Europe.
* Aims at providing up-to-date, reliable information on forest fires at the pan-
European scale, providing European level assessments during both pre-fire and
post-fire phases, thus supporting fire prevention, preparedness, fire fighting and
post-fire evaluations.
* EFFIS is intended as a complementary system to national and regional fire
information systems in the countries, which provides harmonized information
required for international collaboration on forest fire prevention and fighting and
in cases of trans-boundary fire events.
November 12, 2012 3

4. Forest fires in Europe
Every year:
65,000 fires on average.
500,000 hectares burned.
Casualties and heavy economic
impact.
November 12, 2012 4

5. http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
November 12, 2012 5

6. http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
Provides information
before fire (danger
forecast)
during fire (fire detection,
burned area rapid
mapping)
after fire (land cover
damage assessment,
forest fire emissions,
potential soil erosion)
November 12, 2012 6

7. EFFIS Summary
Input Models, data Output
integration, analysis
Wind speed
Burned area vs Monthly Severity Rating in EUMed
Fire Danger Forecast
(June to October 1985-2005)
Fine Fuel Moisture Duff Moisture Drought Code
500,000
Code (FFMC) Code (DMC) (DC)
450,000 y = 2199.1e0.4099x
Remote 400,000 R2 = 0.7551
350,000
Monthly burned area (ha)
300,000
sensing Active Fire Detection
INITIAL SPREAD BUILD UP 250,000
200,000
INDEX (ISI) INDEX (BUI)
150,000
100,000
50,000
-
FIRE WEATHER INDEX 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
(FWI) MSR
Weather Fire Monitoring
forecast
Av burned area (m2)
Damage Assessment
Bv biomass (g m-2)
Geo-datasets Fire Emissions
CO2 = ∑ Av × Bv × C × Ev
C burning efficiency (g g-1) v
Post-fire Soil Erosion
Regional estimates
Data
Data Databases of CO2 emissions
Data
Evemission coefficient for CO2 Fire News
WEB interface at
(http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu)
November 12, 2012 7

8. http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
November 12, 2012 8

9. The fire news application
November 12, 2012 9

10. The process
November 12, 2012 10

11. Quick facts
* a web application for geoparsing and analyzing web feeds
to identify forest fires news
* has replaced a semi manual process built on top of Google
Reader, Google Maps and GDAL scripts
* the news are always verified by manual intervention before
being published (but work flow can be different)
* the application is used in the context of forest fires, but can
be used for other aims (just use the generic geofeeds
application, on which the FireNews application is based)
November 12, 2012 11

12. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
November 12, 2012 12

13. Work flow
November 12, 2012 13

14. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
November 12, 2012 14

15. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
November 12, 2012 15

16. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for
filtering in and out feed items
November 12, 2012 16

17. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for
filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for
filtering in and out feed items
November 12, 2012 17

18. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for
filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for
filtering in and out feed items
4. For each feed the user can add a series of countries/places
for filtering in and out geoparsed feed items
November 12, 2012 18

19. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for
filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for
filtering in and out feed items
4. For each feed the user can add a series of countries/places
for filtering in and out geoparsed feed items
5. Feed items are then displayed from the web application
(with eventual geoparsed places)
November 12, 2012 19

20. Work flow
November 12, 2012 20

21. Work flow
0. The user can query and navigate existing fire news and
proposed geoparsed feeds
1. The user may add a series of feeds (RSS/Atom) to analyze
2. For each feed the user can add a series of keywords for
filtering in and out feed items
3. For each feed the user can add a series of URL domains for
filtering in and out feed items
4. For each feed the user can add a series of countries/places
for filtering in and out geoparsed feed items
5. Feed items are then displayed from the web application
(with eventual geoparsed places)
6. User can archive uninteresting feed items or can promote
and tag feed items for important forest fire news items
November 12, 2012 21

22. Work flow
November 15, 2012 22

23. What's behind
* the application is developed in Django (Python)
* datastore is PostGIS (--> Spatialite, Oracle Spatial or
NoSQL database)
* supports RSS (from 0.90 to 2.0) and Atom (0.3, 1.0) via
Universal Feed Parser
* geoparse of feed is performed via Yahoo! Placemaker
or via a custom implementation based on GeoNames
* geocode is performed via Google Maps, GeoNames and
Yahoo! Maps via GeoPy
* fire news are eventually exposed as GeoRSS, KML and
Shapefile by the application
November 12, 2012 23

24. EFFIS VGI integration
* It is possible to integrate VGI (still via RSS feeds, filtering
per user/keywords)
* Twitter
* Flickr
* YouTube
* others
* Example: twitter rss feed per "forest fire" keyword:
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=forest+fire
November 12, 2012 24

25. Sm@rtFeeds
* Sm@rtFeeds: https://github.com/capooti/smartfeeds
* This is the web application engine used and customized in
the context of the FireNews application
* Still at a very early stage of development
* It can be used for any context: disaster management,
crisis, news, brand monitoring, trends analysis, just as a
different smart aggregator. Whenever you need useful
information from massive amounts of data
* Works for now just with RSS feeds. Willing to implement
the SMS and Email feeds
* A Python alternative to Ushahidi SwiftRiver
November 12, 2012 25

26. License of this document
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
2012, JRC
License details: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0:
You are free:
* to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
* to Remix — to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or
licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
*Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the
resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
With the understanding that:
* Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the
copyright holder.
* Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
o Your fair dealing or fair use rights;
o The author's moral rights;
o Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used,
such as publicity or privacy rights.
November 12, 2012 26