FireMapper
See how wildfires are spreading across Europe — where they are burning right
now, how fast they are growing, and what they have already destroyed.
🔥 Open the map →
⚠ Not an emergency service. This map visualises public satellite data,
which can be hours old and is never an official alert. If you are in danger,
call 112 and follow your local authorities.
Why
Most fire maps answer one question: where is it burning? They show today's
dots and forget yesterday's. But the story people actually need is time —
fire seasons are getting longer and more intense, and each individual fire has a
history: when it started, which way it ran, how much it took.
FireMapper is built around that. Every view is about change over time, and the
whole thing is free, open, and needs no account.
What you can do
Start with the overview — active fires and recent burn scars across Europe.
The bar chart along the bottom is one bar per day: click any day to see where
fire was burning that day. A badge tells you whether this week is worse than the
last.
Click a fire to open its card. The map flies in and everything becomes about
that one fire: how big it is, when it ignited, whether it is still growing,
which way it is spreading, the nearest town. Its burn footprint is coloured by
when each patch caught — and clicking a bar in its history rewinds the fire, so
you can watch it grow.
See the damage. For fires that have already burned, a before/after slider
compares satellite imagery of the same place — green forest on one side, black
scar on the other.
Run it yourself
You need uv (Python) and Node.
make setup # install dependencies
make sample # build a demo dataset — no API key, no account
make dev # open the map at http://localhost:5173
That's it — no server, no database to run. The map reads plain static files.
make sample needs no key: the keyless sources (Meteosat intensity, wind) are
real and live, and the fire history is synthetic so the demo is never empty.
Want the real fire history too? Get a free
NASA FIRMS key, drop it in
.env (copy .env.example), then make refresh-full — 30 days of real VIIRS
detections replace the synthetic ones. make refresh-fast updates only the live
layers and never needs a key.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome — see
CONTRIBUTING.md to get started, and the
Code of Conduct for the ground rules.
Good first contributions: more curated historical fires
(pipeline/notable_scars.json is plain data),
translations, colour-blind-safe palettes, or accessibility fixes.
Learn more
- Architecture — how the pipeline and map work, and
where the data comes from.
- Map design rules — the cartographic
constraints every layer is built against.
- Deployment — how the live map is hosted.
- AGENTS.md — orientation for AI coding agents.
Credits
Built on open data from NASA FIRMS, EUMETSAT, Copernicus,
Open-Meteo, GeoNames, and OpenStreetMap. Thank you to everyone who
keeps those services public.
License
MIT © Frederic Robinet
