FIRE-RES Geo-Catch: a mobile application to support reliable fuel mapping at a pan-European scale

doi:10.3832/ifor4376-016

FIRE-RES Geo-Catch: a mobile application to support reliable fuel mapping at a pan-European scale

Erico Kutchartt⁽¹⁾ , José Ramón González-Olabarria^(2-3), Antoni Trasobares⁽²⁾, Sergio de-Miguel^(3-4), Adrian Cardil⁽⁵⁾, Brigite Botequim^(6-7), Vassil Vassilev⁽⁸⁾, Palaiologos Palaiologou⁽⁹⁾, Martino Rogai⁽¹⁰⁾, Francesco Pirotti^(1-11)

iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry, Volume 16, Issue 5, Pages 268-273 (2023)
doi: https://doi.org/10.3832/ifor4376-016
Published: Oct 19, 2023 - Copyright © 2023 SISEF

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We present a browser-based App for smartphones that is freely available to end-users for collecting geotagged and oriented photos depicting vegetation biomass and fuel characteristics. Our solution builds on advantages of smartphones, allowing their use as easy sensors to collect data by imaging forest ecosystems. The strength and innovation of the proposed solution is based on the following points: (i) using a low memory footprint App, streaming images and data with as little data-volume and memory as needed; (ii) using JavaScript APIs that can be launched from both a browser or as an installed App, as it applies features such as service workers and Progressive Web App; (iii) storing both image and survey data (geolocation and sensor orientation) internally to the device on an indexed database, and synchronizing the data to a cloud-based server when the smartphone is online and when all other safety tests have been successfully passed. The goal is to achieve properly positioned and oriented photos that can be used as training and testing data for future estimation of the surface fuel types based on automatic segmentation and classification via Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Keywords

Mobile Data Collection, Citizen Science, Smartphone Position and Orientation, Wildfire, Image Analysis, Progressive Web Apps

Authors’ address

(1)

0000-0002-9134-4591
0000-0002-4796-6406
Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry - TESAF, University of Padova, v. dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, PD (Italy)

(2)

0000-0002-5040-712x
0000-0002-8123-9405
Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia - CTFC, Carretera de Sant Llorenç de Morunys, Km 2, 25280 Solsona (Spain)

(3)

0000-0002-5040-712x
0000-0002-9738-0657
Joint Research Unit CTFC - AGROTECNIO - CERCA, Carretera de Sant Llorenç de Morunys, Km 2, 25280 Solsona (Spain)

(4)

0000-0002-9738-0657
Department of Agricultural and Forest Sciences and Engineering, University of Lleida, 25198 Lleida (Spain)

(5)

0000-0002-0185-3959
Tecnosylva, Parque Tecnológico de León, 24009 León (Spain)

(6)

0000-0002-6661-190x
CoLAB ForestWISE - Collaborative Laboratory for Integrated Forest & Fire Management, Quinta de Prados, 5001-801 Vila Real (Portugal)

(7)

0000-0002-6661-190x
Forest Research Centre, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Tapada de Ajuda, 1349-017 Lisbon (Portugal)

(8)

Space Research and Technology Institute, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, str. “Acad. Georgy Bonchey” bl. 1, 1113 Sofia (Bulgaria)

(9)

0000-0001-8507-5201
Department of Forestry and Natural Environment Management, Agricultural University of Athens, 36100 Karpenisi (Greece)

(10)

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR, Istituto per la BioEconomia, v. Madonna del Piano 10, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, FI (Italy)

(11)

0000-0002-4796-6406
Interdepartmental Research Center of Geomatics - CIRGEO, University of Padova, v. dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, PD (Italy)

Corresponding author

Erico Kutchartt
erico.kutchartt@unipd.it

Citation

Kutchartt E, González-Olabarria JR, Trasobares A, de-Miguel S, Cardil A, Botequim B, Vassilev V, Palaiologou P, Rogai M, Pirotti F (2023). FIRE-RES Geo-Catch: a mobile application to support reliable fuel mapping at a pan-European scale. iForest 16: 268-273. - doi: 10.3832/ifor4376-016

Academic Editor

Marco Borghetti

Paper history

Received: May 09, 2023
Accepted: Jul 10, 2023

First online: Oct 19, 2023
Publication Date: Oct 31, 2023
Publication Time: 3.37 months

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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