According to prognoses, forest fires, including fire clearing in tropical rain forest, will halve the world forest stand by the year 2030. In Europe, up to 10,000 km2 of vegetation are destroyed by fire every year, and up to 100,000 km2 in North America and Russia. Approximately 20% of CO2 emission into the atmosphere is caused by forest fires . (Kührt E., Knollenberg J., Mertens V. , An automatic early warning system for forest fires, Annals of Burns and Fire Disasters - vol.XIV - n. 3 - september 2001 )
Croatia belongs to countries with high forest fire risk. In summer seasons seven coastal counties in Croatia and in particular the Adriatic islands are permanently exposed from high to very high fire risks, due to densely-spaced conifer forests. Only in Split and Dalmatian County In the year of 2003, wildfire occurred as many as 130 times. The total burned area in the year 2003 was 9.700 ha. The direct and indirect damage of the lost woody biomass in 2003. in Split and Dalmatian County was assessed at the level of 16 and 60 mil.€, respectively (B. Hrastnik, Branimir; D. StipaniÄev, R. VujÄić, Forest Fire Protection by 24h Monitoring, Wood Collection Intended for District Heating Plants and Easy Access Routes Assigned to Firemen and Tourism, 2nd World Conference on Biomass for Energy, Industry and Climate Protection ETA-Florence, Italy and WIP-Munich, Germany , 2004.. V3.36.).
Fires on Croatian islands
The only effective way to minimize damage caused by forest fires is their early detection and fast reaction, apart from preventive measures. Great efforts are therefore made to achieve early forest fire detection, which is traditionally based on human surveillance. Usually the human surveillance is realized by 24 hours observation by human observers located on monitoring spots. In Croatia the human forest fires surveillance is mainly organized by Croatian Forests (Hrvatske šume) – the governmental organization responsible for protection and exploitation of forests in state ownership. Human surveillance is usually organized only during summer months. For example in Split and Dalmatia County there are 16 forest fire surveillance stations of Croatian Forests in operation from June 1st to September 15th and there are also few other observation stations organized by other authorities and organizations. Human observers are usually equipped only with standard binoculars and communication equipment and their observation area is only the area covered by their sight of view.
A rather new, technically more advanced approach to human forest fire surveillance is installation of remotely controlled video cameras on monitoring spots. Now the human observer is not located on the monitoring spot anymore. His observation station is the monitoring centre equipped with adequate video presentation and video storing devices connected with wires or wireless to distant video cameras located on monitoring spots. The video cameras based human forest fires surveillance has many advantages in comparison to direct human observation on monitoring spots. Let us mention the most important of them:
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Using video cameras the human observer is capable of monitoring a wider area covered by few video monitoring field units.
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Cameras are usually equipped with power zoom (optical zoom with 22 x magnification) so the observer could easily inspect suspected areas.
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System usually has video storing capabilities, at least for the last couple of days, and that is quite useful for post-fire analysis.
The next more advanced step in forest fire monitoring is automatic surveillance and automatic early forest fire detection system . Operator is not any more responsible for routinly image analysis. The system do that for him, but his/her decision is final when the suspicious behavior is detected and alarm window raised.
The catastrophic fire season in the year of 2003. motivated researchers at the Department for Modelling and Control at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture University of Split to initiate research connected to early detection of forest fires based on images captured by video cameras in the visible spectra. After two years of research supported by Ministry of science, education and sport of Republic Croatia through grants for technological project and Split and Dalmatia Counity, advance and innovative forest fire video detection and early warning system was developed and experimentally tested during 2005 and 2006 fire seasons. The system was named iForestFire - Intelligent Forest Fire Monitoring System.