Search Results (4)

This paper presents a review of concepts related to wildfire risk assessment, including the determination of fire ignition and propagation (fire danger), the extent to which fire may spatially overlap with valued assets (exposure), and the potential losses and resilience to those losses (vulnerability). This is followed by a brief discussion of how these concepts can be integrated and connected to mitigation and adaptation efforts. We then review operational fire risk systems in place in various parts of the world. Finally, we propose an integrated fire risk system being developed under the FirEUrisk European project, as an example of how the different risk components (including danger, exposure and vulnerability) can be generated and combined into synthetic risk indices to provide a more comprehensive wildfire risk assessment, but also to consider where and on what variables reduction efforts should be stressed and to envisage policies to be better adapted to future fire regimes. Climate and socio-economic changes entail that wildfires are becoming even more a critical environmental hazard; extreme fires are observed in many areas of the world that regularly experience fire, yet fire activity is also increasing in areas where wildfires were previously rare. To mitigate the negative impacts of fire, those responsible for managing risk must leverage the information available through the risk assessment process, along with an improved understanding on how the various components of risk can be targeted to improve and optimize the many strategies for mitigation and adaptation to an increasing fire risk. Full article

This paper presents a semantic conceptual framework and definition of environmental monitoring and surveillance and demonstrates an ontology implementation of the framework. This framework is defined in a mathematical formulation and is built upon and focused on the notation of observation systems. This formulation is utilized in the analysis of the observation system. Three taxonomies are presented, namely, the taxonomy of (1) the sampling method, (2) the value format and (3) the functionality. The definition of concepts and their relationships in the conceptual framework clarifies the task of querying for information related to the state of the environment or conditions related to specific events. This framework aims to make the observation system more queryable and therefore more interactive for users or other systems. Using the proposed semantic conceptual framework, we derive definitions of the distinguished tasks of monitoring and surveillance. Monitoring is focused on the continuous assessment of an environment state and surveillance is focused on the collection of all data relevant for specific events. The proposed mathematical formulation is implemented in the format of the computer readable ontology. The presented ontology provides a general framework for the semantic retrieval of relevant environmental information. For the implementation of the proposed framework, we present a description of the Intelligent Forest Fire Video Monitoring and Surveillance system in Croatia. We present the implementation of the tasks of monitoring and surveillance in the application domain of forest fire management. Full article

In this paper, we describe a method for the prediction of concentration of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) from satellite data in the coastal waters of Kaštela Bay and the Brač Channel (our case study areas) in the Republic of Croatia. Chl-a is one of the parameters that indicates water quality and that can be measured by in situ measurements or approximated as an optical parameter with remote sensing. Remote sensing products for monitoring Chl-a are mostly based on the ocean and open sea monitoring and are not accurate for coastal waters. In this paper, we propose a method for remote sensing monitoring that is locally tailored to suit the focused area. This method is based on a data set constructed by merging Sentinel 2 Level-2A satellite data with in situ Chl-a measurements. We augmented the data set horizontally by transforming the original feature set, and vertically by adding synthesized zero measurements for locations without Chl-a. By transforming features, we were able to achieve a sophisticated model that predicts Chl-a from combinations of features representing transformed bands. Multiple Linear Regression equation was derived to calculate Chl-a concentration and evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative evaluation resulted in $R^2$ scores 0.685 and 0.659 for train and test part of data set, respectively. A map of Chl-a of the case study area was generated with our model for the dates of the known incidents of algae blooms. The results that we obtained are discussed in this paper. Full article