A Night at the OPERA: A Conceptual Framework for an Integrated Distributed Sensor Network-Based System to Figure out Safety Protocols for Animals under Risk of Fire.

Oscar Tamburis,Nadia Piscopo,Alessandro Tocchi,Luigi Esposito,Francesco Giannino,Giorgio Di Fiore,Christian Esposito,Mauro D’Arco

doi:10.3390/s20092538

Abstract

Large scale wildfire events that occurred around the world involved a massive loss of animal lives, with a consequent economic impact on agricultural holdings and damages to ecosystems. Preparing animals for a wildfire evacuation requires an extra level of planning, preparedness and coordination, which is missing in the current practice. This paper describes a conceptual framework of an ICT system implemented to support the activities of the Regional Veterinary referral Center for non-epidemic emergencies (CeRVEnE) in the Campania Region for the twofold objectives. On the one hand, it realizes the monitoring of the wooded areas under risk of fire in the so-called “Mount Vesuvius’ red zone”. On the other hand, it determines the OPtimal Evacuation Route for Animals (OPERA) in case of fire, for each of the reported animal species living in the mentioned red zone. The main innovation of the proposed system lies in its software architecture that aims at integrating a Distributed Sensor Network (DSN), an ad-hoc software to generate timely simulations for fire risk modeling, and a GIS (Geographic Information System) for both the activities of web mapping and OPERA definition. This paper shows some effective preliminary results of the system implementation. The importance of the system mainly lies in its accordance with the so-called “Foresight approach” perspective, that provides models and tools to guarantee the prevention of systematic failure in disaster risk management, and becomes moreover critical in the case of Mount Vesuvius, which hosts a unique combination of both animal and anthropic elements within a delicate natural ecosystem.

Highlights

Any world’s complex system interacts with its environment, and this in turn features microsystems interacting with it: a large and delicate chain of interactions that, once broken down, affects the named system, and the whole surrounding system in an irreversible manner that leads to the loss of its function, causing a not readily recovering to a previous situation [1].Under such a premise, providing a well-specific and shared definition for the term “disaster” is not an easy task, as it encompasses any kind of rapid-onset natural and man-made hazards, from disease spreading to avalanches, to railway accidents, just to name a few [2,3,4]
The geospatial data provided from the South Italy Experimental Zoo-prophylactic Institute (Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale del Mezzogiorno, IZSM) concerning the fires that occurred in the Mount Vesuvius surrounding area during the years 2007–2017, made it possible to localize all the beekeepers’ farms, other than collecting information as to the negative impact of the fires on their production dynamics
Thirty-four farms in the Vesuvian area, and set at a distance of less than 1 km from the areas directly involved in fire episodes; Six farms within the boundaries of the Municipality of Palma Campania, and set at a distance of less than 1 km from the areas directly involved in fire episodes; Forty-one farms comprised between 1 km and 7 km from the areas directly involved in fire episodes

Summary

Introduction

Any world’s complex system interacts with its environment, and this in turn features microsystems interacting with it: a large and delicate chain of interactions that, once broken down, affects the named system, and the whole surrounding system in an irreversible manner (systematic failure) that leads to the loss of its function, causing a not readily recovering to a previous situation [1].Under such a premise, providing a well-specific and shared definition for the term “disaster” is not an easy task, as it encompasses any kind of rapid-onset natural and man-made hazards, from disease spreading to avalanches, to railway accidents, just to name a few [2,3,4]. The whole set of actions itself to be defined, organized and eventually deployed to handle a disaster goes under many declinations, depending in this case on the specific aspects to be accounted for: the panorama spans the concepts of disaster management (whose main focus is handling the events), risk management (which reviews trends with a concentration on the analysis of the risks and develops a certain response), and disaster risk management (which has a look at trends and events, and proposes some actions) [6] In this scenario, the CeRVEnE (Italian acronym for “Regional Veterinary referral Center for non-epidemic emergencies”) [7] was established in 2017 in the Italian Region of Campania, pursuing the objective of the Regional Government to improving and protecting people’s health through the timely management of both veterinary and non-veterinary epidemic emergencies related to animal health as well as to food safety. Among the initiatives of CeRVEnE, the FRAC Program (Fire Risk Assessment in Campania Region) was presented in 2018, as a project through which the Center intends to provide the Regional Government with a strategic tool able to: (i) gather and supply in a short amount of time all the necessary information to those professionals called to handle fire-related risks; (ii) have a large (both specialized and not specialized) public informed about the operational processes to get started after the fire damages in terms of safeguard and recovery of ecosystems (and related services), wild and domestic fauna, production supply chains; and (iii) figure out a standardized methodology for gathering data and supporting decisions

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