BeZero Carbon is a global ratings agency for the Voluntary Carbon Market. Combining expertise across climate science, finance and policy, it provides ratings, risk, and data tools that improve information accessibility and decision making. Its aim is to build markets for environmental impact. In Sense4Fire, they lead the development of the Global Fire Atlas GFA-S4F approach to map fires and fire emissions in near real time.
Team members: Niels Andela, Dave van Wees
The Professorship in Environmental Remote Sensing at TUD Dresden University of Technology (TUD) leads Sense4Fire. They contact research on remote sensing for forest fire research and management, microwave remote sensing for forest-water interactions, and remote sensing for landscape change and agriculture. In Sense4Fire, they lead the development of the TUD-S4F Earth observation data-model fusion approach for fuel loads, fuel moisture, fuel consumption and fire emissions.
Team members: Matthias Forkel, Daniel Kinalczyk, Johanna Kranz, Xiao Liu, Christopher Marrs, Christine Wessollek
The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) is the Dutch national weather service and centre for climate research. In Sense4Fire, they develop several approaches based on Snetinel-5p (KNMI-S5p) to benchmark bottom-up fire emission datasets.
Team members: Jos de Laat, Vincent Huijnen
March 2026
Wildfires that swept across the Amazon in 2024 were the most devastating in more than two decades. A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters from the Sense4Fire project suggests that emissions may have been up to three times higher than earlier estimates.
de Laat, A.T.J., Andela, N., Forkel, M., Huijnen, V., Kinalczyk, D., van Wees, D. (2026).
Sentinel-5p Reveals Unexplained Large Wildfire Carbon Emissions in the Amazon in 2024
Geophysical Research Letters 53, e2025GL115123. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL115123
ESA publsihed a news article about this paper.
The Sense4Fire datasets used in this paper are available under Datasets (Database version 3).
June 2025
ESA’s Living Planet Symposia are among the world’s premier events on Earth observation. In 2025, it takes place in Vienna, Austria, from 23-27 June. The Sense4Fire team has two presentations at LPS:
Matthias Forkel et al.: Novel Earth observation data-model fusion approaches reveal dominant role of woody debris in fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado (Tuesday 24.06.2025, 14:00, Session A.03.04 Model-data interfaces and the carbon cycle, Room 1.34)
Daniel Kinalczyk and Matthias Forkel: Quantifying the effect of bush encroachment on fuels and fire emissions in southern Africa with a satellite-based data-model fusion approach (Wednesday 25.06.2025, 17:45, Poster A.02.08 Impacts of fire in the Earth system, Room X5, Zone L-M)
June 2025
On June 19, 2025, TU Dresden signed a new contract with the European Space Agency to extend the successful **Sense4Fire** project. The collaboration with the established consortium — **TU Dresden**, **KNMI**, and **BeZero Carbon** — will continue throughout 2025 and 2026, focusing on the development of innovative fire emission products.
New Fire Emission Products for Africa
Fire emissions will be reprocessed for Africa (2019–2025) using the GFA-S4F and TUD-S4F approaches. The new version will integrate updated, high-resolution land cover data from ESA WorldCover and take into account fuels from shrubs.
High-Resolution Fire Emission Estimates
The TUD-S4F approach will be adapted to high spatial resolution (20 m) to estimate fuel loads and fire emissions in selected African study regions (2016–2025). This will utilize land cover from ESA WorldCover, as well as leaf area index and burned area data derived from Sentinel-2.