The use of serious games and applications has emerged as a dominating force in training, education and simulation due to the focus on creating compelling interactive environments at reduced costs by adopting its capacity of engaging younger hi-tech generations in the highly motivated gaming environments and to the opportunities offered by the commodity technologies commonly associated with the ...

Wildfire cumulative frequency – area distributions of Mediterranean landscapes are examined for agreement with self-similar (fractal) behavior. Our results support landscape-specific restricted scaling regions of 1.5 – 3.5 orders of magnitude in size, which are delimited by breakpoints or ‘cut-offs’. By identifying the extent of such regions in the fractal frequency – area distribution of wildf...

Leadbeater’s possum is an endangered species particular to mountain ash country in the Central Highlands of Victoria. The species is threatened by the outbreak of catastrophic wildfire and the loss of nesting sites resulting from logging trees younger than 150 years of age. A stochastic dynamic programming approach to determine how much logging should be foregone to enhance the probability of s...

This paper focuses on spatial distribution of long-term fire patterns versus physical and anthropogenic elements of the environment that determine wildfire dynamics in Greece. Logistic regression and correspondence analysis were applied in a spatial database that had been developed and managed within a Geographic Information System. Cartographic fire data were statistically correlated with basi...

The rising popularity of large-scale real-time analytics applications (real-time inventory/pricing, mobile apps that give you suggestions, fraud detection, risk analysis, etc.) emphasize the need for distributed data management systems that can handle fast transactions and analytics concurrently. Efficient processing of transactional and analytical requests, however, require different optimizat...

A wildfire model is formulated based on balance equations for energy and fuel, where the fuel loss due to combustion corresponds to the fuel reaction rate. The resulting coupled partial differential equations have coefficients that can be approximated from prior measurements of wildfires. An Ensemble Kalman Filter technique is then used to assimilate temperatures measured at selected points int...

A wildfire model is formulated based on balance equations for energy and fuel, where the fuel loss due to combustion corresponds to the fuel reaction rate. The resulting coupled partial differential equations have coefficients that can be approximated from prior measurements of wildfires. An ensemble Kalman filter technique with regularization is then used to assimilate temperatures measured at...

Evolving wildfire management policies are aimed at more comprehensive treatments of current wildland fire management problems. Key policies are identified that affect wildfire and fuels management. Policies are discussed in the context of institutional factors such as interagency cooperation and the growing number of regulations and laws. Key economic principles, such as the Coase Theorem, are ...

24 A cornerstone of effective institutional learning and accountability is the development, tracking, and analysis of informative performance measures. In a previous issue of Fire Management Today (“A New Look at Risk Management,” Winter 2011), a series of articles highlighted the importance of organizational safety and risk management and the challenges of balancing safety, efficiency, and eff...

This paper describes a support platform for integrating services and technologies, most of them specifically devoted to wildfire fighting. The platform presented summarizes a three years work project, funded by the Prometeo research project, involving a consortium of fifteen companies and several research centers and universities. Sensors, control command centers, 3D visualization technologies,...