New satellite map shows high-risk areas for wildfires

A new satellite map, designed to predict wildfires and integrated into a technology tool for rural property management, allows users to identify the areas most at risk of fire this summer at the parish level across mainland Portugal.

“This year, you can check your land before summer arrives. For the first time in Portugal, a 10-metre satellite map shows this year’s fire conditions for every plot of land in the country,” promoters of the ‘LandOS, A Minha Terra’ platform, tell Lusa.

Pedro Rocha, from the project’s development team, explains that the new map has been created by a Dutch company “which works on mathematical models and artificial intelligence, but with a strong focus on fire prevention”.

“By introducing other variables, they managed to generate this map, which gives us a predictability of the areas where there is a higher risk of fire,” said Rocha, emphasising that “LandOS” uses official information produced by government bodies as its basis, and involves a range of data, statistical, climatic and other, to calculate fire risk. These structural risk maps are technically very well made, Rocha adds. They map the landscape conditions – from terrain to slope, vegetation type and land-use history – that make fire more likely.

Given the existing structural risk in Portugal – embodied in a map “that doesn’t change every 10 years – LandOS set out to create a seasonal risk map.

“We looked at what happened last winter, from the amount of rainfall to the presence of vegetation and accumulated wood, all these new variables, as well as where fires burned last summer: areas with little or no vegetation cover this year, but which on the structural map remain at high risk of fire,” Rocha adds.

The new map does not, however, work in real time: “It does not show, day-by-day or hour-by-hour, where the risk lies. It is a map that, at the start of summer, tells us, for example, where the situation is worse. And that will help us, in the future, to direct resources towards clearing work.”

Pedro Rocha gave the example of the Alentejo, where it rained heavily last winter: “If we look at the structural risk, it may appear at a low level. But if we look at the seasonal risk, we will see that there are areas that appear as high risk,” he explains.

On the platform’s page, which states that “one in three parishes show high levels of fuel and vegetation this season”, there are further examples – one of which concerns the central interior region (municipalities of Pampilhosa da Serra, Arganil and Covilhã).

“These are among municipalities with the highest structural risk in Portugal. The 2025 fires burned a large part of this region – the 2026 seasonal layer (of the map) reflects this; the fuel has disappeared and the risk this year is clearly lower than the structural baseline suggests.’

Another example focuses on the Algarve interior, “historically one of the lowest-risk areas on the structural map”.

However, “LandOS” warns that following an “unusually rainy winter, the satellite layer shows dense vegetation in parts of the interior – fuel that does not normally exist there”.

Other data available on the technology platform shows that a significant proportion of forest areas in the northern and central interior of the country have burned three or more times in the last 20 years – confirming that certain landscapes in Portugal are structurally predisposed to wildfires.

Source: LUSA