Abstract: One of the biggest challenges faced during the wildfires is communication. A specific case represents the need to establish communication between first responders and the public. This paper presents a proposal for a generic protocol to ensure effective communication between fire fighters and many citizens at the incident site or in the surrounding area using nontraditional information sources such as a dedicated mobile app or social media. Specific challenges, concepts and technologies relevant to such communication are described specifically customized for forest fires and wildfires. The protocol itself is provided by proposing information flows between the involved actors. Moreover, several technologies including a Citizen Engagement Mobile App, an Edge Micro Data Center for forward command centers, a Mesh in the Sky communication infrastructure or a Dashboard integrating and displaying all the data in one place is shortly introduced. The presented paper is a work in progress.

Abstract: The coordinated response of fire has become a priority need for effective participation of actors. Within this scope, Geo-Information Technologies (GIT) will help to reduce of catastrophic results of disaster and protect lives and resources, with dynamic use of geo-data in fire disaster management. Interoperable geo-data is urgent need for fire disaster management. With assigned tasks, fire brigade is the most effective actor for the fire disaster management at different phases. In this study, actors that could act in a GIT based fire disaster management are defined. Activities in management phases of the possible fire disaster and geo-data needs to manage these activities were determined. According to this background, case activities such as producing fire risk map, optimizing locations of response teams, and the like were developed by using GIT. This approach can be a preliminary work to trigger effective and collaborate use of geo-data in fire brigade services.

Abstract: With the advancement and proliferation of technology, non-profit organisations have embraced social media platforms to improve their operational capabilities through brand advocacy, among many other strategies. The effect of such social media campaigns on these institutions, however, remains largely underexplored, especially during disaster periods. This work introduces and applies a quantitative investigative framework to understand how social media influence the behaviour of donors and their usage of these platforms throughout (natural) disasters. More specifically, we explore how on-line engagement – as captured by Facebook interactions and Google search trends – corresponds to the donors’ behaviour during the catastrophic 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season. To discover this relationship, we analyse the record of donations made to the Australian Red Cross throughout this period. Our exploratory study reveals that social media campaigns are effective in encouraging on-line donations made via a dedicated website. We also compare this mode of giving to more regular, direct deposit gifting.

Abstract: The creation of action statistics of fire extinction services is a common activity in the management of forest-fires emergencies. The compilation of action data and the elaboration of statistics based upon those data allow drawing relevant information about forest fires emergencies and fire extinction services. The creation of action statistics requires the exchange of heterogeneous data, with different granularity and detail, among scattered sources. This paper introduces a Forest Fire Report Data Model devoted to be a data reference model for sharing and exchanging forest fire reports in order to achieve syntactic interoperability among independent systems. The definition of the model has been based on the review of forest fire statistics made by different agencies as well as the experience gained in developing an information system, called SIU6, for the creation of action reports of.

Abstract: Several research studies have shown the importance of social media data for humanitarian aid. Among others,
the issue of missing and lost people during disasters and emergencies is crucial for disaster managers. This work
analyzes Twitter data from a recent wildfire event to determine its usefulness for the mitigation of the missing and
found people issue. Data analysis performed using various filtering techniques, and trend analysis revealed that
Twitter contains important information potentially useful for emergency managers and volunteers to tackle this
issue. Many tweets were found containing full names, partial names, location information, and other vital clues
which could be useful for finding missing people.

Abstract: Understanding human behaviour and interactions in risk situations may help to improve crisis management
strategies in order to avoid the worst scenarios. In this paper we present a geospatial agent-based model and
simulation of human behaviour in bushfires. We have modelled the social interactions between different actors
involved in bushfires such as firefighter, police, emergency centre managers and civilians. We use the Belief,
Desire and Intention (BDI) architecture to model realistic human behaviour, and the FIPA-ACL standard to
model the communications. We use geospatial data to represent the environment in a realistic way. We show
how the model has been implemented and how we have unified the communications model and the BDI
architecture. Finally, we compare the processing time of two implementations of our model representing a 2D
simple and a 3D GIS environment.

Abstract: This paper concerns the development of the South African Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS). We describe a use case of wildfires causing electricity transmission lines to be adversely affected. This use case provided the rationale for investment into a system for detecting and monitoring wildfires. AFIS functionality is described and we quantify its user acceptance and benefits before discussing ongoing research and implementation efforts to allow AFIS to become a standards-compliant, service-oriented system serving the original use case but re-deployable or re-usable by other organisations for similar or alternative purposes. We end with a view of future work that will potentially allow AFIS to reach a wider audience.

Abstract: This paper reports research in progress into a study of information flow and teamwork in Incident Management Teams (IMTs) in Australia. The research project, funded by the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre. The overall research design includes interviews with experienced personnel, observations of real-time incidents and training simulations and a national questionnaire of incident management practices. Data reported in this conference session will focus on a sample of observation data conducted in two training simulations of a wildfire incident. Observations were video recorded and key IMT members wore lapel microphones. Video data has been coded for use of artifacts (e.g., maps, status boards) and room movement. Audio data has been coded for by the quantity and quality of interactions within and between IMT functions. The presentation aims to contribute to an understanding of what enables and constrains effective teamwork and information flow within Incident Control Centers (ICCs) in Australia.

Abstract: This article contributes to identifying the capabilities of Instagram when utilized as a source of Volunteered
Geographic Information (VGI) for disaster management (DM) purposes. The geographic focus of this research is
in the Mediterranean area. As case study, the fire event of East Attica 2018, Greece, was chosen. This major fire
occurred on the 23rd of July 2018 and caused the death of 100 people, the injury of additional 164 while the total
burnt area was about 1275,9ha. It is the deadliest in modern Greece?s history and the second deadliest at a global
level, within the 21st century. About 15000 related photos along with the corresponding captions and timestamps
were crawled from Instagram. An initial sample of about 1100, was analyzed, by using a certain methodology
divided in certain steps, the most important of which include the classification of the information to certain
categories, geo-referencing and the creation of graphs and maps that visualize the processed data.

Abstract: Concepts such as trust, shared understanding, cultural differences, mental workload, and organizational structure all impact upon the effectiveness of an organization (e.g., Tindale & Kameda, 2000), and even more so in the context of large scale multinational operations (e.g, Smith, Granlund, & Lindgen, 2010). In order to study these concepts we plan a multinational, distributed experiment with participants from three nations collaborating in the same virtual environment: Canadian, British, and Swedish participants will work together as part of a multinational MTS to deal with a complex task and gain control of a crisis situation. Empirical research on MTS remains limited (see, e.g., DeChurch & Marks, 2006) particularly at the multinational level where the investigation of MTS has been so far focused on case studies and exercises (e.g., Goodwin, Essens, & Smith, 2012). Therefore, there is a need to empirically study multinational MTS in order to assess the specific issues that multinational operations face, notably cultural and languages differences. The simulation environment used as experimental platform for this project is C3Fire (www.c3fire.org, Granlund & Granlund, 2011). C3Fire creates an environment whereby teams must work together to resolve a crisis in the firefighting domain, with the goal of evacuating people in critical areas, putting out the forest fire, and protecting buildings and other areas of value from the burning forest fire. This platform makes it possible to study participants' collaborative processes when dealing with a set of crisis scenarios in the context of a simulated emergency response situation. To deal efficiently with the crisis management operation, participants need to prioritize between different objectives, identify and protect critical areas, and plan and implement activities based on given resources. All these tasks are distributed between team members, compelling participants to exchange information and coordinate within and between teams to execute the task. The task is divided into three areas of responsibility as follows: 1) Information and Planning, responsible for situation assessment and providing the operating picture; 2) Operation and Logistic, responsible for intervention and resource management; and 3) Search and Rescue, responsible for research and management of civilians. C3Fire is designed to: 1) achieve an optimal compromise between internal and external validity; 2) show flexibility in scenario configuration (spectrum of units and roles – including search and rescue functions; Tremblay et al., 2010), allowing researchers to capture emergency response and crisis management and rapid response planning; 3) be highly configurable for testing many different types of teams (e.g., hierarchical vs. horizontal organizations); and 4) readily provide objective, non-intrusive metrics for assessing teamwork effectiveness (including macrocognitive functions and team processes) as well as quantitative measures of task performance (that take into account conflicting mission goals). © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: The dynamic nature of emergency decision making exerts difficulty to decision makers for achieving effective management. In this regard, we suggest a dynamic decision making model based on Markov decision process. Our model copes with the dynamic decision problems quantitatively and computationally, and has powerful expression ability to model the emergency decision problems. We use a wildfire scenario to demonstrate the implementation of the model, as well as the solution to the firefighting problem. The advantages of our model in emergency management domain are discussed and concluded in the last.