engleski

HOLISTIC project -­‐ Application of ICT in wildfire prevention and protection with emphasize to wildfire monitoring and surveillance in Adriatic area

The costal area of Adriatic and its neighboring areas belong to regions with high risk from forest fires, especially during the summer due to very warm climate with low level of humidity, densely spaced conifer forests, lot of tourists visiting various costal regions and islands, and many other case specific and organizational reasons. One of such high risk regions is Split -­‐ Dalmatia County, where for example during the year 2003 some 130 wildfires occurred, causing direct damage of almost 16 million €. Although the fire fighting professionals are quite good organized and coordinated, the existing fire prevention/protection measures in the Adriatic region are far from being satisfactory. Fire surveillance and monitoring systems in most parts are still based on simple human observers, although today modern Information – Communication Technologies (ICT) give a lot of advance features concerning, not only early fire detection and fire monitoring, but also fire behavior modeling and simulation and fire risk index prediction. The similar situation is with other fire prevention and protection measures. They are not existing, not implemented in the whole area, or not economically implemented. For example the large quantity of biomass, remaining after the seasonal cutting of trees due to maintenance of forests and fire paths and after the forest fires, or after seasonal clearing of private agricultural plots are usually burned on the field or simply remain where they have been catted, instead of being used as a valuable biomass energy source. Therefore, Split-­‐Dalmatia County from Croatia has initiated in 2007 preparation of strategic project target to IPA Adriatic funds, based on new holistic approach to forest fires protection and prevention. The proposed Holistic Forest Fire Prevention (HFFP) program was based on various topics, trying to integrate technical fire protection measures, economic use of biomass, tourism and recreation through advanced forest fire monitoring system based on network of automatic video surveillance and meteorological monitoring stations but also trough organized system for collection of forest looping after forest fire thinning and clearing, its chopping and use as a commercial biomass fuel in communal district heating and cogeneration plants as well as systematic clearance of forest corridors not only as easy access routes for fireman’s, but also as routes for sport, recreation and village eco-­‐tourism

forest fires; wildfires; forest fire protection; ICT in forest fires; sustainable forest management.

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