The management of wildland/urban interfaces is one of
the key-points of wildland fire prevention policy and land management
in Mediterranean regions. Foresters, fire-fighters and engineering
offices need methods and tools: to assess the fire risk for
exposed targets (people, structures and buildings) on these
interfaces, and to test the preventive efficiency of the wildland
fuel reduction. The technological objective of Fire Star is
to provide methods and tools to the end-users through a decision
support system. Researchers and end-users will jointly define
the functionalities of the system. Researchers of the Consortium
will also pursue the following main scientific objectives: to
improve the methods of wildland fuel description and to develop
Mediterranean models, to enhance the predictive ability of the
wildland fire behaviour model, and to improve the knowledge
of wildland fire effects on the exposed targets. |
Fire Star consortium will specify end -users' needs
and define with them the problems to be solved (type of questions,
characteristics of wildland fuel and target on the interface).
Modellers will improve the physics of the model of wildland
fire behaviour with experimentalists. They will extend the predictive
ability of the existing model to wildland-urban interface scales,
and develop a 3D version of the model. They will investigate
the effects of wildland fire onto the targets through the coupling
of the wildland fire model and the heat transfer to the target.
Specialists of structure fires will provide data related to
people's tenability and to material responses to heat supply.
The modellers will provide the simulations of wildland fire
behaviour and effects matching the scenarios defined with the
end-users. Experimentalists will improve the knowledge of some
basic wildland fire mechanisms and properties. For this, they
will adapt some advanced optical measurement methods to the
particular conditions of wildland fires. The modellers will
inc lude these improvements into the model of wildland fire
behaviour. They will also provide data for its validation (laboratory
tests and field fire experiments). Experimentalists will determine
the thermal-physical characteristics of wildland fuel particles
and will describe and model the spatial structure of the wildland
fuel (input of the model of wildland fire behaviour). It will
be essential to provide the spatial distribution of the different
fuel families for a given ecosystem from a set of "simple" field
measurements performed on the vegetation. Computer scientists
will design and develop the decision support system. They will
also manage a network of servers and computers to enable an
efficient exchange of data, methods and models between the partners
. The researchers will provide pedagogical supports explaining
how to use the decision support system. |
