News

  • January 2025

    Publication in Nature Geoscience

    The Sense4Fire team published together with further collaborators a paper in Nature Geoscience:

    Forkel, M., Wessollek, C., Huijnen, V., Andela, N., de Laat, A., Kinalczyk, D., Marrs, C., van Wees, D., Bastos, A., Ciais, P., Fawcett, D., Kaiser, J. W., Klauberg, C., Kutchartt, E., Leite, R., Li, W., Silva, C., Sitch, S., Goncalves De Souza, J., Zaehle, S., and Plummer, S. (2025)
    Burning of woody debris dominates fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado

     

    In the paper, an intercomparison of several fire emission estimates in presented for the fire season 2020 in the Amazon and Cerrado. Then the contribution of different fire types and fuel components to the total fire emissions are investigated, showing that emissions are dominated by smouldering combustion of woody debris.

    ESA also published an article about the paper along with a very nice animation of the key results.

    All datasets related to the paper are open available at https://doi.org/10.25532/OPARA-688 and at this website under "Data".

     

  • November 2024

    Demonstration of the near-real time database

    The Sense4Fire project provided near-real time estimates of fire emissions for the Amazon/Cerrado for the year 2024. Thereby we provided three updates at the end of July, end of August and end of September 2024. This demonstrates the near-real time capabilities of the GFA-S4F and TUD-S4F approaches. The near-real time results of the fire emissions in 2024 have been presented and discussed with the scientific community at various scientific events:

    - Fire Modelling Development Brainstorming Workshop; Leverhulme Centre for Wildfire, Science and Society; 16-18 September 2024, Dartington Hall, UK

    - 13th EARSeL Forest Fires Special Interest Group Workshop; 19-20 September 2024, Milano, Italy

    - Future Focus Wildfires. Community forum on Earth Observation for wildfires monitoring; EUMETSAT; 26-28 November 2024, Darmstadt, Germany | [Presentation PDF]

     

     

  • October 2024

    Fire season in the Amazon 2024: Near-real time database online

    The Amazon experienced an exceptional fire season in 2024. The Sense4Fire project provided near-real time estimates of fire emissions during this season with the GFA-S4F and TUD-S4F approaches. Forest fires caused especially higher than normal emissions in Bolivia. Estimated emissions of carbon monoixde (CO) are between 56 (GFA-S4F) and 62 Tg (TUD-S4F) for the period August adn September 2024.

    Data overview and download

     

  • April 2024

    EGU General Assembly 2024

    The Sense4Fire project partners attended and presented at EGU General Assembly 2024 at the Vienna International Conference Center, Austria from the 14th-19th April

    Matthias Forkel (TUD) Multiple approaches for quantifying fuels, combustion dynamics, and regional fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado | [PDF]

    Niels Andela (BeZero) New insights on global fire extremes from object-based fire inventories | [PDF]

    Dave Van Wees (BeZero) Comparison and validation of state-of-the-art fire emissions models for the Amazon | [PDF]

     

     

     

  • May 2024

    Sense4Fires Experimental Database V0.2 online

    We release the second version of the Sense4Fire fire emissions estimates in the second version of the experimental database. The database contains dataset of fuel and fire properties and fire emissions for the study regions Amazon/Cerrado, southern Africa, eastern Siberia and southern Europe.

    Data overview and download

     

Dave van Wees is a Remote Sensing scientist at BeZero Carbon, a global carbon ratings agency (2023 - now). Previously, he worked as post-doctoral research scholar (2022-2023) and PhD researcher (2016-2022) at VU-University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. During his PhD, he developed an approach to estimate global forest losses from fire (van Wees et al., 2021) and a novel 500-m resolution global fire emissions product (van Wees and van der Werf, 2019; van Wees et al., 2022), resulting in improved attribution of carbon losses from fire.

In a recent shared first author publication in Nature, he challenges current assumptions about the trend in the CO2 airborne fraction, a critical parameter for predicting future climate (van Marle, M.J., van Wees, et al., 2022). 

References

Van Wees, D. and Van Der Werf, G.R. (2019). Modelling biomass burning emissions and the effect of spatial resolution: a case study for Africa based on the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED). Geoscientific Model Development, 12, 4681-4703.

van Wees, D., van Der Werf, G.R., Randerson, J.T., Andela, N., Chen, Y. and Morton, D.C., 2021. The role of fire in global forest loss dynamics. Global Change Biology, 27(11), pp.2377-2391.

van Wees, D., van der Werf, G.R., Randerson, J.T., Rogers, B.M., Chen, Y., Veraverbeke, S., Giglio, L. and Morton, D.C. (2022). Global biomass burning fuel consumption and emissions at 500 m spatial resolution based on the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED). Geoscientific Model Development, 15, 8411-8437.

van Marle, M.J., van Wees, D., Houghton, R.A., Field, R.D., Verbesselt, J. and van der Werf, G.R., 2022. New land-use-change emissions indicate a declining CO2 airborne fraction. Nature, 603(7901), pp.450-454.