European Forest Fire Information System

The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) consists of a modular web geographic information system that provides near real-time and historical information on forest fires and forest fire regimes in the European, Middle Eastern and North African regions. Fire monitoring in EFFIS comprises the full fire cycle, providing information on the pre-fire conditions and assessing post-fire damages.

The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) has been established by the European Commission (EC) in collaboration with the national fire administrations to support the services in charge of the protection of forests against fires in the EU and neighbouring countries, and also to provide the EC services and the European Parliament with harmonized information on forest fires in Europe.

Since 1998, EFFIS is supported by a network of experts from the countries in what is called the Expert Group on Forest Fires, which is registered under the Secretariat General of the European Commission. Currently, this group consists of experts from 43 countries in European, Middle East and North African countries.

EFFIS includes, starting from the pre-fire state, the following modules:

1. Fire Danger Assessment,

2.Rapid Damage Assessment, which includes

     (2.1.) Active fire detection,

     (2.2.) Fire severity assessment and

     (2.3.) Land cover damage assessment,

3. Emissions Assessment and Smoke Dispersion,

4. Potential Soil Loss Assessment, and

5. Vegetation Regeneration.

Additionally, another EFFIS module supporting fire monitoring is the Fire News module, which geo-locates all the news related to forest fires that are published on the internet in any of the European languages.

Near-real time information on the first two modules mentioned above is provided through the so-called “current situation” viewer.

At the core of EFFIS lies the so-called Fire Database, which includes detailed information of individual fire records provided by the EFFIS network countries. Currently data in the database comprises nearly 2 million records provided by 22 countries. Information on the data in the database is provided through the fire history application of EFFIS.