THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF CRISIS MAPPERS
Crisis-mapping forest and bush-fires
One very particular type of fast-moving crisis is a raging forest fire (or bush fire as we call them), of the type that killed 121 people north of Melbourne on February 9th this year on "Black Saturday". Relaying up-to-date information to people over large areas so that good evacuation decisions can be made should obviously include continuously updated online maps. This morning in New South Wales a number of fires are raging, and the authorities do have a map available.... but these types of maps could potentially be much improved. Do any crisis-mappers out there have suggestions? Examples of better maps?
It strikes me that crisis-mapping bush fires make an interesting test-bed for other types of crisis - they can be rapidly changing, widespread, and many people may make life-or-death decisions that depend critically on good information specific to their locality. A successful crisis-mapping solution for forest and bush fires would have many of the attributes that would prove valuable for helping in more slow-moving crises. Any thoughts?
It strikes me that crisis-mapping bush fires make an interesting test-bed for other types of crisis - they can be rapidly changing, widespread, and many people may make life-or-death decisions that depend critically on good information specific to their locality. A successful crisis-mapping solution for forest and bush fires would have many of the attributes that would prove valuable for helping in more slow-moving crises. Any thoughts?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Chris Blow on -
Great points.
Here are the very similar (and rudimentary) fire maps from Australia.
I agree that the maps could be improved with extra data -- I think one good place to look is on the realtime networks, like Twitter.
Fires in San Diego prompted the first use of a Twitter hashtag in a crisis, as described by Chris Messina.
We should have more sophisticated tools for listening to (and taking action with) the information that comes out of this type of disaster.
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Permalink Reply by brian quinn on -
On Australian Bushfires
The sentinel website is good http://sentinel.ga.gov.au/acres/sentinel/index.shtml
click on map then the disclaimer button
you can also get the info as kml etc
They use the data to track arsonists I believe. The patterns of fire show arsonist at work as opposed to random fires. Then send in guest speakers on dangers of fire to the local schools....as some arsonists are just idiot kids
From USA you can get data for other areas of the world:
http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/kml.htm
and can subscribe to FIRMS for email alerts of fire locations from around the world using above umd.edu data
I suspect that some fires in conflict zones might be places/villages being burned. Might be worth subscribing to alerts for particular area if you wanted to track battle etc areas...bit like tracking arsonists.
It would be nice if it was real time.....
Also State of Victoria has this website
http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/incidents/incident_summary.htm
but last week on Total Fire Ban day it was overloaded with traffic and ceased operating
I reckon you could come up with analytical tool that could determine non random fires...
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Permalink Reply by Charles Worringham on -
Thanks, Chris and Brian, for these links. I'd also missed this discussion which includes the Victorian site as well as versions produced by news organisations.
The overloading of the Victoria site was also an issue in the February fires "The Victoria Country Fire Authority (CFA) [has] asked people not to access its websites unless they think they are in immediate threat of bushfire, as its webservers are unable to cope with the surge in public interest." ... the design of sites that come into their own in a crisis should obviously take account of likely peak traffic generated by the crisis..
Brian, your point about the use of such fire mapping/data in conflict zones makes an interesting link to the broader humanitarian focus of this group - a possible indicator of burning villages and the like. Is the spatial resolution of the FIRMS data up to this sort of application?
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Permalink Reply by brian quinn on
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Firms can be downloaded as GoogleEarth file, but only shows hotspots as ballons as the satellite goes over
have to look at it each day to get the passage of the fire
Google paid for Haiti satellite pictures so can see the earthquake damage in detail
if you could get them to take pictures of war zone could get some idea of what was near the hotspot
see the GE kmz of relief trucks with large queue of people in front also the plastic shelters nearby - Attachments:
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haiti relief trucks.kmz, 1 KB
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Permalink Reply by John Walling on
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Permalink Reply by Lars Bromley on
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As mentioned above, much work on fire mapping has been done via NASA at the University of Maryland (http://modis-fire.umd.edu/index.html; http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/). They've been doing satellite based fire monitoring work for at least twenty years, and released and SMS based fire notification system for South Africa years ago. This was the first SMS based fire update system I learned of and was designed for monitoring remote, isolated areas so fires could be addressed before they became major events. Several satellite systems can provide fire monitoring data, with a major one being the MODIS sensors above the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites. These update four times daily. Lastly, I have a paper coming out soon which describes fire detections in Darfur in 2003, and hopefully lays the basis for a global conflict fire monitoring system.
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Permalink Reply by elena rapisardi on -
I am working on a small project in Italy developed with ushahidi, aimed at gathering information that could help forest firefightings.
We have two kind of difficulties: technical and human.
Technical: e.g. most of the map (kml files) are developed for google earth and they need some "cleaning" to be used for googlemaps, scarcity of public data.
Human: low web litteracy of the users (using facebook does not mean knowing how to use web resources), low willingness to contribute to a common project (the attitude is to have one's own site, project, solution.... a lot of "photocopy" projects)
Do you know any best practices on managing (colect, share, distribute, update) data, resources and crowdsourcing on forest fires fightings?
I am interested on the following issues: gmaps, web resources available, involving people, commitment....
Thanks.
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Permalink Reply by brian quinn on
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http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/incidents/incident_summary.htm
that is a Victorian, Australia example of a website with map current fire incidents
not crowdsourced but an example of an application that many can access and understand
Ushahidi is a great app but I think mapping fire locations accurately from sms would be very dificult. In last years fires here I could see one plume of smoke that I thought was ~30 km closer than it really was, previous year another I thought something like ~100 km closer than it was. Very hard to estimate distance unless you can see the base of the fire.Most of our major bushfires once they get going are hidden under huge clouds of smoke often accompanied by duststorms and you don't see the flames until they are upon you. It gets quite dark and at night even worse.
You need to map locations of flames rather than smoke.
You will get very local information, like the fire is in Bill Elliot's back paddock. Very hard to map that sort of stuff from HQ with out local knowledge.
With gps smartphones could send photos with geolocation, and direction of shot. That might help to triangulate on the plume.
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