The EFFIS - European Forest Fire Information System has been established by the EC - European Commission in collaboration with the national fire administrations to support the services in charge of the protection of forests against fires in the EU and neighbor countries, and also to provide the EC services and the European Parliament with harmonized information on forest fires in Europe. http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu
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 at https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/expert-groups-register/screen/expert-groups/consult?do=groupDetail.groupDetail&groupID=416. Currently, this group consists on experts from 43 countries in European, Middle East and North African countries.
In 2015, EFFIS became one of the components of the Emergency Management Services in the EU Copernicus program. EFFIS consists of a modular web geographic information system that provides near real-time and historical information on forest fires and forest fires 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.
EFFIS includes, starting from the pre-fire state, the following modules:
1) Fire Danger Assessment
2) Rapid Damage Assessment, which includes
- Active fire detection
- Fire severity assessment
- Land cover damage assessment
3) Emissions Assessment and Smoke Dispersion
4) Potential Soil Loss Assessment
5) Vegetation Regeneration
Additionally, other EFFIS module supporting fire monitoring is the Fire News module at https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/firenews.viewer which geo-locates all the news related to forest fires that are published in 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 https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/effis_current_situation/index.html
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.