Operational cartography

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Used by : most of the countries

Example of cartography from Copernicus ERCC.

Operational mapping is a support and decision-making tool. It helps visualizing an event in a given territory and time. The interest is to present a realistic vision of the event as well as the operation.

It exists four main objectives :

- to give the event information in space and time

- to show all the information that promotes decision-making

- to show the evolutive data such as fire perimeter or stakes

- to point out the possible response scenarios.

Example of use :

FRANCE

In France, operational fire cartography are based on several layers from "défense de la forêt contre l'incendie DFCI", translated by forest fire defense. The entire territory is mesh by coordinates. You can see them in : https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/donnees/carroyage-dfci

Map are created by Valabre and the National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information and allows the superposition of many layers such as forest access roads, water points, cities perimeters, campings, critical infrastructure etc.

The operational cartography is used either with paper, either on digital format and updated by a firefighter officer, in charge of anticipation of the incident.

ITALIA

In Italia, the operational cartography depends on the region you are in. To take the example of Tuscany region forest fires organization, maps are generated by DREAm ITALIA at the request of Tuscany Region. Informations such as roads, structures, fuel breaks, water points, topography, vegetation groups are displayed on a 1/25 000 scale map and available on paper as in numerical format.

The only difference between the two is that the digital format allows you to measure distances and areas in a more interactive way.

However, fire analyst prefer to work on numerical format as they can draw the fire perimeter and annotate needed information on the ground.

During the incident, the map is updated by the incident commander itself and his team within the incident command post.

SOUTH WALES FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE

Digital maps allow to better analysis the terrain where the fire is moving. Also, they are useful to decide strategies (access roads, anchors, etc) and trigger points as well as opportunities.