Israel has a long history of fire, since its early uses in the Paleolithic period. In this talk, Prof. Noam Levin will follow the history of fires in this region, discuss the current drivers of wildfires and remote sensing approaches used in Israel for mapping wildfires and their associated hazards.

About the speaker

Noam Levin is a Professor and Head of the Remote Sensing Lab in the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2008. He also holds an honorary appointment at the University of Queensland. Noam studies geographical and environmental patterns and processes of land cover changes in the face of human- and climate-induced changes using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Noam has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles on these and other related topics. In his work, he combines fieldwork, remote sensing of satellite images, spatial analysis of GIS layers, statistical analyses and modelling. Noam’s current research focuses on remote sensing of night lights as indicators of human activity, wildfires, conservation planning over spatial scales from local to global, landscape ecology and historical geography.