Monitoring of Forest and Vegetation Fires from Global to Local Scales – with a Look at Armenia

About the Event:

Fire is a major disturbance in the Earth system. Fires occur across ecosystems from the boreal to the tropical zones, and more recently, possibly as a consequence of climate change, even in the Arctic tundra landscapes. This talk will give an overview on the dynamics and impacts of fire on the Earth system and carbon cycle, and will introduce the application of satellite remote sensing for deriving quantitative information on fires. Over the last decade, availability of free and open Earth observation data, such as those produced by the European Copernicus program, has improved considerably. At the same time, both the availability of free and open source software for processing Earth observation data, and the availability of cheap computing resources has substantially increased. This has opened new opportunities for monitoring highly dynamic phenomena, such as fire. Based on physical background and through real live examples from across the globe, the potential and limitations of different types of sensors are discussed: sensors working with radar beams and sensors measuring the reflected sunlight in the visible to shortwave infrared domain can detect changes induced by fire. Sensors measuring the thermal infrared signal emitted by fires can help detect the location of fire fronts and quantitatively asses the heat emitted by fires. The increased availability of resources for high-performance computing also facilitates the development of new applications based on large scale automated processing of Earth observation data for fire monitoring. This in turn opens the path for the development of new data and information products and services, some of which are presented in the talk. In the final part of the talk, fire monitoring results for Armenia are presented, and the fire situation in Armenia is discussed.

About the Speaker:

Gernot Rücker is co-founder and managing director of ZEBRIS, a German Consulting firm in the area of sustainable natural resource management. His interest for fires developed during his master’s thesis (in Geography at University of Munich received in 1996) when he worked in a fire-prone area in Spain. In one of the first projects with ZEBRIS, he and his team helped mapping the catastrophic damage from fires in Indonesia during the 1997/1998 El Nino episode. This work was later published in the prestigious science journal “Nature” and thus helped raising awareness on the global significance of Indonesia’s fire disaster. He later worked on fire related projects in three continents. Over the past years, he worked intensively on methods to asses smoke and greenhouse gas emissions from fires through automated processing of Earth observation data. This research led to the development of an automated fire monitoring system, which was launched in late 2016 under the name of firemaps.net. Gernot Rücker is currently working on the combination of Earth observation data with fire modelling. This will support both fire ecologists in analyzing fire impact and fire fighters in suppression planning.