Coppe is the only American continent representative to participate in an international forest fire management project
Planeta COPPE / Civil Engineering / News
Date: 01/08/2024
Researchers from Coppe/UFRJ’s Technology Transfer Center (NTT) are acting on the Silvanus project, which will produce a technological and informational platform for forest fire management. The project has specialists from 49 institutions from the European Union, Australia and Indonesia, with Coppe being the only one from the American continent.
The researchers are on a mission to develop an innovative, environmentally sustainable and climate resilient forest management platform, through the creation of new technologies. The main goal is to prevent the ignition and intelligently fight the global spread of forest fires, promoting the efficient usage of resources.
At Coppe, the studies are coordinated by professors Nelson Ebecken and Rogério Espíndola, of NTT, which is connected to the Civil Engineering Program. They are acting in the formation of a digital knowledge base about fire management and the assessment of machine learning methods recently proposed for forest fire analysis. The professors are also acting on the mobilizing of local interested partners in forest fires, and the translation of advertising materials and proposed technologies into Portuguese.
The platform will offer a big data processing framework capable of integrating heterogeneous data sources, including terrestrial observation, meteorological, climate modeling, embedded computing and video streaming data. Sensors and actuators (devices aimed at converting energy into movement) will be used to feed the data to the platform, coupled to aerial vehicles and terrestrial robots that will be guided by wireless communication. Among the resources to be made available by the platform, resilience models, results of environmental and ecological studies, and the assessment of fire risk indicators stand out.
Coppe’s NTT Coordinator, Nelson Ebecken explains that the project has established synergies between environmental specialists, informational technology and social sciences. These are synergies to improve the capacity of competent authorities in monitoring forest resources, assessing biodiversity, generating more accurate fire risk indicators and promoting citizen safety through educational campaigns.
The produced and proposed technologies are being demonstrated in a total of eleven meetings for validation, carried out in European, Australian and Indonesian institutions. The last meeting for the demonstration and final platform validation will be held at Coppe, between February 24th and 28th of 2025. Learn more about the project: https://silvanus-project.eu
