Providing a space for shared ambition and open collaboration, the FIRE-RES network facilitates impactful innovation partnerships. One example is the growing synergy between umgrauemeio’s Pantera platform and ForeFire. This collaboration story shows that innovators can create real-word impact when technical integration is paired with a common mission: to protect lives and ecosystems.
ForeFire: Openness is Key
ForeFire is a high-performance, open-source wildfire simulator developed by Jean-Baptiste Filippi and his team at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of the University of Corsica, who are part of the FIRE-RES consortium. It constitutes the cornerstone of an innovation featured in FIRE-RES and is designed for advanced simulation of Extreme Wildfire Events (EWE) on the basis of an atmospheric model called MesoNH. It is a widely used open-source code for predicting fire spread, which has been adopted by French National authorities as well as private companies. AriaFire uses it for its Firecaster solution via direct licensing from CNRS. Ororatech cloned ForeFire’s repository to build their global FireSpread solution.
Pantera: Partnerships add Strength
Umgrauemeio is an active participant in FIRE-RES’s Open Innovation Challenge. Their Pantera platform is a comprehensive wildfire management system from Brazil, integrating AI-powered camera detection, satellite monitoring, and response coordination.
The collaboration between the two innovators began in late 2022, when the Pantera team was exploring open-source tools to improve their fire prediction capabilities and discovered ForeFire’s open-source code on GitHub, a platform for sharing and collaborating on code projects.
Antonio Leblanc from umgrauemeio aptly describes how powerful an addition to the Pantera platform it constitutes:
"Integrating Prof. Filippi's ForeFire engine into Pantera provides actionable foresight, moving beyond detection to predict fire spread and enabling informed, proactive responses."
Recognizing the power of combining the two technologies, the umgrauemeio team, under CTO Antonio Leblanc, became contributors to the open-source project. Their focus was on enhancing the tool’s usability and integration pathways – crucial for operational deployment.
“We saw an opportunity not only to use ForeFire, but to contribute to it—making it more accessible and better suited for real-time wildfire response
The result was a win-win situation for both innovators: the hazard-focused ForeFire tool became more usable, and the information-to-action approach of Pantera was able to add a predictive function to let firefighters and local authorities anticipate where the fire would spread to. But the real winners – benefitting from both – are users of the combined technology such as firefighters and local authorities.
From Advanced Simulation to Lifesaving Action
The value of the Pantera–ForeFire integration was demonstrated powerfully during the 2024 wildfire season in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands.
A Pantera tower detected a critical smoke plume at Fazenda Santa Tereza from over 20 km away. This real-time detection provided the precise ignition data needed to automatically launch a ForeFire simulation. The resulting projected fire path was displayed directly on the operational map on the platform, turning a simple alert into an actionable strategic forecast for the Brigada Alto Pantanal response teams. Utilizing Pantera with ForeFire’s predictive simulations, response coordinators gained up to four hours of advance warning on fire behaviour, directly informing the safe evacuation of two vulnerable communities.
FIRE-RES: A Platform for Impact
While their technical collaboration began bilaterally, it has solidified in the context of the FIRE-RES project because both umgrauemeio and the ForeFire initiative are part of the project’s large and growing network. This network provides a platform to amplify the reach and impact of effective wildfire management tools by introducing them to third parties in the project’s Living Labs and the broader European wildfire community.
The Pantanal incident is a compelling example of how open collaboration through FIRE-RES can lead to real-world protection – not just of ecosystems, but of human lives