Sara Jones

Sara models and maps forest fire in Sweden, specializing in applying GIS, remote sensing, and spatial analysis to quantify fire susceptibility and support evidence-based forest management. 

Sara’s research aims to improve the resilience of Swedish forests to increasing fire risk under a changing climate. Using Sentinel-2 imagery and advanced spatial modelling, Sara, along with her colleagues, have quantified how forest composition and fuel characteristics influence fire susceptibility and spread. This work integrates statistical modelling with cellular automata simulations to produce spatially explicit fire risk assessments.

Building on this, her research applies a wide range of remote sensing and GIS techniques, including satellite and UAV data, to map fuels, monitor fire severity, and landscape-scale fire dynamics. The research emphasizes geospatial data management, spatial statistics, and predictive modelling, making it relevant for both forest management applications and academic investigations into fire ecology and landscape resilience.

GIS in forest and landscape (BSc)

BSc. Geology and Zoology, Rhodes University, South Africa 
BSc. Honours African Vertebrate Biodiversity, Rhodes University, South Africa 
MSc. Environmental Management, Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany
MSc. Geographical Information Science and Earth Observation for Environmental Modelling and Management from Lund University, Sweden. 

Jones, S. S., Matsala, M., Delin, E. V., Subramanian, N., Nilsson, U., Holmström, E., & Drobyshev, I. (2025). Forest structure, roads and soil moisture provide realistic predictions of fire spread in modern Swedish landscape. Ecological Modelling, 499, 110942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110942

Matsala, M., & Jones, S. (2024). Map of Swedish Forest Fires >10ha from 2016-2022 (1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10885772

Jones, S. S., Matsala, M., Delin, E. V., Subramanian, N., Nilsson, U., Holmström, E., & Drobyshev, I. (2025). Linking forest fire modelling and simulation with decision-support systems in Sweden. Poster Presentation. IUFRO World Conference 23-29 June 2024