Led by the company INAER Helicópteros, the project includes such important partners as Hispasat, Indra Espacio, Telvent Abengoa and Deimos-Imaging.

The government-owned corporations Castilla-La Mancha Environmental Management (Geacam) and Vaersa, of Valencia’s Generalitat, have been chosen to form part of the technological research project named PROMETEO: “Technologies to comprehensively combat forest fires and for the conservation of our forests”.

Sources from the project have pointed out its importance at both the national and international levels, due to the enormous number of uses that it could have in the very near future, in order to combat forest fires with high standards of efficiency and safety.

The project is supported and co-financed by the Center for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), a part of the Ministry of Science and Innovation. It has a budget of close to €28 million, and will focus on different topics related to forest fires such as safety, prevention and extinguishing them.

Prometeo is broken down into 10 work modules. Vaersa will lead one of them: “Technologies for the conservation of forests in the event of forest fires”. It will also have an important role to play in “Recovery of areas affected by forest fires”. For its part Geacam will lead “New procedures and technologies to assist putting out forest fires: safety for ground crews”.

In the first phase, the project aims to: Establish the basis for characterizing the biomass of forests, humidity of vegetation, temperature and species using sensors; characterizing the ground according to its humidity content, as an early indicator of fire hazard risk; and developing new methodological models for identifying areas of risk.