Analysis of the Niebla wildfire (Huelva): severity and recovery with satellite data

The recent wildfire in Niebla (Huelva) is a harsh reminder of how vulnerable our territory is to fire, a reality that hits hard for those of us working for the natural environment in Andalusia.

As forestry engineers, watching fire tear through the land always leaves a sense of helplessness. Yet, faced with the desolation of the post-fire landscape, technology now offers us fundamental tools to understand the impact and speed up the ecosystem's recovery.

Over these days we have analysed the evolution of the affected area directly from SilvIA Earth. When processing this kind of crisis, the goal is not simply to draw a polygon on a map, but to extract an exact X-ray of the terrain:

• Severity analysis (dNBR): lets us immediately assess which areas of the soil have suffered extreme damage and need emergency intervention, versus those with greater potential for natural regeneration.
• Managing satellite "noise": by cross-referencing thermal and optical data, we isolate the real impact of the fire from other terrain anomalies (such as agricultural burns or land-use changes near the perimeter).
• Actionable information: we turn terabytes of Earth-observation data into clear diagnostics so that restoration teams and administrations don't work blind.

Space remote sensing and data analysis are no longer the future of forest management: they are the most urgent present. From that need comes our commitment: to provide technology that translates the complexity of satellites into real solutions for the forest.

Many thanks to the team's work —Rafael Dias Ribeiro de Almeida and Gabriel Romero Martel—: step by step we are building a system so that wildfire management becomes predictive instead of reactive.