D - F
type: Concept

FIRE/MTV
type: Concept
in scheme: projects
definition: Background and rationale: At some time or another most of the world's terrestrial ecosystems are directly affected by fire. Though some fires occur naturally (wildfires), by far the greater part are the result of human activities. Much of the world's tropical savannahs are periodically burned; in Africa alone around 75% of the savannah burns annually, an area of more than 300 millions hectares. Forest fires, savannahs fires, burning of fuel wood, charcoal production and burning of agricultural wastes together consume an estimated 8680 million tons of dry plant material per year. The consequences of biomass burning are extremely diverse. It affects atmospheric chemistry, climate, vegetation distribution and, of course human avtivities. The ecological, environmental and economic effects of biomass burning occur across all scales, from the local to global, yet systematic documentation of global biomass burning patterns and history are not available. This lack of information is keenly felt, both by the international scientific community, and by policy makers. The research project FIre in global Resource and Environmental monitoring (FIRE) has been initiated in 1994, by the Monitoring of Tropical Vegetation unit (MTV) of the Commission of the European Union Joint Research Centre, in order to adress such issues during a 4 years period, with a key objective being the documenting of biomass burning patterns for the entire tropical belt and the analysis of such patterns in relation to land use/land cover dynamics. An integrated approach to biomass burning studies: At the 1991 Dahlem Workshop on Global Changes in the Perspective of the Past, a proposal was made to integrate established fire behaviour and emission models into a new approach, where ecosystem characterisation, in terms of fuel situation and satellite identification of fire occurrence are the starting point. The FIRE project is concentrating in particular on those acpects of the Dahlem model driven by satellite d…