The Wildfire Task Group Chair, Dr Nina Dobrinkova, is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT-BAS) in Bulgaria. The Institute was founded in 2010 as a successor of the Institute for Parallel Processing (IPP), Institute of Information Technologies (IIT) and Institute of Computer and Communication Systems (ICCS).
Dr Dobrinkova acted as Wildfire Task Group Chair of the DRIVER+ Wildfire Task Group network within CMINE during the year 2019. Her main duties as group chair were to lead discussions about potential solutions for better land management strategies and common legislative framework dealing with the new reality called – Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) accompanied by climate change. Ideas about possible changes on EU level have been elaborated by the CMINE members and common paper has been approved for publication under the Mediterranean Security Event 2019 called: “Wildfire risk reduction based on landscape management”. Officially the group will end its work on the final conference of DRIVER+ project 19-20 February 2020 (https://www.driver-project.eu/final-conference/).
Dr Dobrinkova obtained her PhD in 2012 specializing in systems for early warning with an emphasis on wildfire propagation models and fire spread calculations in real-time. She has held post-doctorate positions in the University of Colorado Denver and the USDA Forest Service, Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in the USA. She worked with WRF-Fire (WRF-Sfire) in UCDenver and Behave Plus, FARSITE and FlamMap in the Missoula Sciences Fire Lab.
Dr Dobrinkova is involved in multiple international and national projects funded under DG ECHO, FP7, H2020, Greece-Bulgaria Interreg, Erasmus+ KA and Bulgarian Science Funds. Currently, the active projects with a wildfire topic on which she is working are:
- “Cooperation for fusing skills on Cloud-based Open GeoInformatics: Innovative Environmental Management (FuseGI)”, funded under Erasmus+ KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices – KA203 – Strategic Partnerships for higher education.
- “Protecting biodiversity at NATURA 2000 sites and other protected areas from natural hazards through a certified framework for cross-border education, training and support of civil protection volunteers based on innovation and new technologies (eOUTLAND)”, funded under Interreg Greece – Bulgaria Cooperation Program 2014-2020.
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