Give a look to the project about forest fires on-line

The area covered by forests in Italy amounts to 8,675,100 ha, corresponding to 28% of the total territory. Although the distribution of the forests over the whole country is quite homogeneous, the phenomenon of forest fires shows pronounced variability from zone to zone: during winter they mainly occur in the Alpine Arc whereas in summer forest fires are most frequent in the regions of Central and Southern Italy. Liguria in this picture is an exception, here forest fires occur during the whole year.

During the past 20 years about 2,697,000 ha were concerned by the phenomena of forest fires; the 19,885 ha burnt in 1996 represent the minimum in the time span analyzed by now.

Fire is a severe risk for forests. Besides the material losses - as burnt trees, bushes and herbs -, a major concern regards the impact of forest fire to the fauna and to the ecosystem in total, which his heavily affected and whose recover is slow and difficult. The consequences on the eco-systems are hardly to assess: for instance, trees and herbs stabilize soils and mitigate the erosive effects of heavy rainfalls and storms.

The comparison of various European countries reveals that in the time span from 1981-1994 Spain was the country with the largest area of 3,010,360 ha concerned by forest fires, followed by Portugal (1,111,156 ha), Italy (783,898), Greece (712,906) and France (539,808). On the other hand the country with the highest number of reported forest fires is Portugal with 215,999 events, followed by Spain with 212,458 events, Italy (187,948 events), France (83,026 events) and Greece (23,779 events).

A first glance on these numbers reveals that, despite of the almost equal area burnt in Italy and Greece, the number of reported events in Italy is higher to about 80%. The approximately same number of reported forest fires in Spain as in Portugal causes a burnt area 66 % higher in Spain than in Portugal.

In this context the necessity for the various authorities to establish advanced systems of monitoring, control and modeling of forest fires development becomes obvious. In countries with a high sensibility with respect to this phenomenon– also due to significant economical interest - advanced systems have been installed which allow to survey the meteorological conditions as well as the actual position and disposal of emergency forces.

Mestor’s efforts are devoted to the following aspects:

• Metho-dology: Studies on mechanisms of forest fire development and propagation
• Descriptive: GIS-bases systems for accurate description of forest (software FIS)
• Emergency Management: Production of updated maps of burnt area, exploiting also spaceborn data
• Emergency planning: Field campaigns and creation of GIS-based maps of points of particular interests like burnable material deposits, gas stations, water reservoirs etc