One project

A Holistic Fire Management Ecosystem for Prevention, Detection and Restoration of Environmental Disasters

December 2021 - May 2025

TREEADS

https://treeads-project.eu/

TREEADS, a large-scale EU Green Deal project, brings together a consortium of 46 partners from 13 European countries and Taiwan, in the fight against wildfires. TREEADS will increase the effectiveness of enhanced sustainable fire and forest management under changing climate conditions, by building upon state-of-the-art high TRL products and latest innovations in fields covering all three stages of fire management - namely fire prevention and preparedness, detection and response, restoration and adaptation - and uniting them under the umbrella of a holistic Fire Management Platform Ecosystem. TREEADS will capitalise on expert knowledge and EU initiatives, but also address the need for proactive governance, change of forest management practices, community-based awareness and preparedness activities, where local communities and bio-economy sectors will play a central role.

Scope

The TREEADS project will adopt a holistic forest fire management approach based on the deployment of a comprehensive forest fire management system covering all interconnected stages of prevention & preparedness, detection & response as well as restoration & adaptation. The overall architecture of the TREEADS project relies on a holistic view of forests. Furthermore, a cornerstone of the proposed architecture is the combination of highly divergent sources of data, originating either form the cyber field (social media, network activity) or from heterogeneous sensors in the physical field, aiming to extract vital information regarding the security of the aerial means and provide intime information, alerts and guidelines to responders, operators and users. The fundamental principle of the TREEADS project relies on the fact that early detection and timely risk assessment can allow prevention or mitigation of the consequences of catastrophic events

Objective

TREEADS aims to increase environmental sustainability and urban/ rural ecosystems safety through redefining and reinforcing forests protection and management by developing and validating an innovative, sustainable and applied holistic wildfire management approach.

The project introduces a number of innovations including:

  • Combination of highly divergent sources of data, originating from both the cyber field and heterogeneous sensors in the physical field.
  • Early detection and timely risk assessment to allow prevention or mitigation of the consequences of catastrophic events.
  • Introduction of socio-geographical and socio-economic factors for the accurate evaluation of risk analysis.
  • Automation in most of the steps that need to be taken during firefighters’ operations to minimize all the significant impacts of fires.
  • Interoperability and scalability of the Ecosystem due to the use of open APIs and common data format for all data sources.
  • Four-layered approach utilisation in the monitoring of forests by exploiting three types of unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite data.
  • Multi-stakeholder approach for efficient integration of expert knowledge in forested social and ecological systems; forest economics and policy; and existing EU initiatives and services.
  • New fire resilient materials, insurance models, health monitoring, AR tools for fire responders, and a drone seeding technology and satellite data.
  • Desktop and mobile user interface of the main computational system provides real time information of the current status, plus the results of the computational analysis of the modules.