This report documents the context and the objectives of a new Fire Monitoring Tool developed in the framework of the JRC activity in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Countries.
Vegetation fires are widespread in Africa and are a key component of many ecosystems. They can be a cause of threat and damage for ecosystems not adapted to them, but for many African habi-tats fires are just as important as rain. As a consequence of this, dedicated fire programs are often included in the protected areas conservation plans to maintain or improve the ecosystem structure and the landscape diversity that are essential to biodiversity. Information on fire activity becomes therefore critical for the implementation of conservation programs and the man-agement of protected areas.
With the support of Earth Observation (EO), fire monitoring is possible, at global level, over long time periods. However, EO products require technological know-how which is often limited for many ecologists and park managers.
In this study we present a new tool for fire monitoring that we developed especially for people working in conservation and park management. The tool is a web client that provides historical and near-real time indicators of the fire activity derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) burned area and active fire products. The MODIS products are dis-tributed by NASA-FIRMS and the University of Maryland and cover more than a decade going from late 2000 to present.
The web client is available on-line and produces, on the fly, graphs, tables and maps of the fire activity, for a selected protected area and period of time. The content and its graphical represen-tation have been designed to provide a synthesis of the fire activity with no need of additional softwares to visualize or use the data.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen
