site.btaAI System Developed by INSAIT Predicts Wildfire Risk in Europe

The first AI system for predicting wildfire risk in Europe at high-resolution and with human-friendly explanations, FireScope AI, developed by the Institute of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Technologies (INSAIT) at Sofia University, has been released, the Education and Science Ministry announced in a press release on Friday.

FireScope AI comes amid a growing risk of wildfires in Europe. According to the European Environment Agency, forest fires cause around EUR 2.5 billion in damage annually in the EU, and the World Meteorological Organization predicts that the risk of forest fires in Europe will continue to increase due to climate change.

FireScope AI enables European countries to immediately and more effectively target wildfire prevention, preparedness, land-use planning, climate adaptation, and many other tasks – where fires are most likely to occur and cause the greatest damage.

FireScope AI outperforms general-purpose models such as GPT-5 and conventional methods such as the Fire Weather Index, the press release said.

FireScope AI works by combining satellite imagery and climate data into continuous risk maps. To produce robust, expert-level fire risk estimates, it uses these inputs to infer vegetation density and dryness, seasonal drought trends, wind patterns and more complex interactions like winds aligning with heat waves, slopes, and vegetation.

FireScope AI uses a novel reasoning-to-generation pipeline, in which an AI model analyzes Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and climate indicators, while a visual model converts this information into detailed fire risk maps.

FireScope was built in collaboration with ETH Zurich. It will be presented at CVPR 2026 in Denver, USA next week. CVPR is the world’s leading computer vision and AI conference. 

The AI framework was developed by a lead research team comprising scientists and vision researchers. The primary creators and authors of the system include: Mario Markov, Stefan Maria Ailuro, Luc Van Gool, Konrad Schindler, and Danda Pani Paudel.