Two students from the Guarda Polytechnic Institute (IPG) have developed wildfire prevention projects that identify the most vulnerable areas and calculate the severity of fires, the university said on Monday.
In a press release sent to Lusa, IPG said data from research projects led by recent topographic engineering graduates has “aroused insurers’ interest in the 2023 Proteger conference.”
“The papers present solutions that can help prevent forest fires. The results can also be very useful for Civil Protection and municipal councils,” he stressed.
Rita Cieiro is the author of the Guarda Wildfire Vulnerability Mapping project, which focused on the construction of four seasonal maps, one for each quarter of the year, analyzing nine variables: land use, land slope, slope exposure, distance to streams , distance to artificial territories, population density, proximity to the road network, temperature and average rainfall.
“These conditions led to vulnerability classifications across Guarda County, with the ability to apply the same type of analysis to other areas of the country,” he described.
Luis Branco is the author of the study “Fire Mapping and General Characterization by Remote Detection”, which focused on the analysis of incidents in 2017 and 2022 in the Guarda area.
This project allowed “distinguishing between different levels of wildfire severity and identifying soils through employment analysis that are more prone to recurrence, with reference and quantification of affected areas.”
According to IPG, these two works were the result of advanced techniques such as satellite image classification, geographic information systems, and remote sensing (gathering information about a phenomenon by analyzing data collected by a device that is not in contact with the same phenomenon), which helped to understand the fire, the state of vegetation and soil.
“Guarda Polytechnic Institute stands out for its commitment to research and the recruitment of highly qualified staff to improve its projects. Every year Portugal is in a state of alarm due to the danger of rural fires, so the role of the IPG as an academy is to use knowledge. it manufactures to prevent and, as far as possible, reduce this problem,” said IPG President Joaquim Brigas.
Guarda Polytechnic professor and project manager Elisabeth Soares believes these are solutions of obvious economic interest, given that “Portugal is increasingly at risk from fires.”
“These studies are very useful for those involved in forest management and clearance, as well as for insurers, helping them assess the risk and damage associated with accidents. also useful for other structures such as Civil Protection or city councils,” he said.
The university also reported that at the Proteger 2023 conference, a fully autonomous “robot-firefighter” was also presented, in the characteristics of which “the detection and extinguishing of fires.”
Born at a robotics competition and turned into a prototype, this robot aims to “advance robotics and enable students to apply knowledge gained in engineering courses to concrete projects.”
“The prototype has been improved throughout these editions, but the robotics still doesn’t fully respond to more realistic, less predictable scenarios. However, we have on the horizon the development of technology that can be useful in firefighting and can be used reliably in the field,” says IPG professor and competition coordinator Carlos Carreto.