The increasing intensity, frequency, and duration of wildfires, driven by climate change, pose significant challenges with devastating human, economic, and environmental impacts. While wildfires can provide some beneficial effects, such as ecosystem renewal, the growing occurrence of extreme fire seasons underscores the urgent need for advanced monitoring solutions.

In this webinar, Professor Yifang Ban will share cutting-edge research that leverages multi-sensor, multi-resolution Earth observation data and deep learning techniques for wildfire monitoring. The presentation will cover early detection of active fires, near real-time monitoring of wildfire progression, and mapping burn severity. These innovations have the potential to significantly improve situational awareness, accelerating wildfire risk assessment and facilitating rapid decision-making and fire suppression efforts.

About the Speaker

Prof. Yifang Ban

Dr. Yifang Ban is the Professor and Director of the Division of Geoinformatics at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and an Associate Director – at Digital Futures in Stockholm, Sweden. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Professor Yifang Ban’s research has been focused on Earth observation big data analytics, machine learning/deep learning for urban mapping, urbanization monitoring and wildfire and flood detection to support sustainable and resilient development. She has published extensively on these topics and has been ranked by Stanford/Elsevier among the World’s top 2% of scientists in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Professor Ban is the PI/Co-PI for a number of impactful projects, including EO-AI4ResilientCities, EO-AI4GlobalChange, HARMONIA, SAR4Wildfire, Sentinel4Wildfire and Climate Change Induced Disaster Management in Africa.

Since 2016, Professor Ban has been an invited expert of the UN Habitat’s Technical Committee on Human Settlements Indicators for the SDGs. She is the lead for the newly established GEO AI4EO sub-group, co-chair of the ICA Commission on Sensor-Driven Mapping, and a co-lead of the GEO Global Urban Observation and Informatics initiative (2012-2022), an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and a scientific committee member of major international remote sensing conferences.