effis-client

Async Python client for the public services of EFFIS, the European Forest Fire Information System (Copernicus Emergency Management Service):

• burnt-area perimeters, from the WFS (nrt.ba.poly);
• the official Fire Weather Index chain (FWI, FFMC, DMC, DC, ISI, BUI) as raw float values from the WMS, sampled at any point.

No account and no API key: both services are public.

Why a library for two HTTP calls

Because the EFFIS endpoints are MapServer, not GeoServer, and every GeoServer habit fails differently — usually without an error:

The last one is the dangerous one: an all-zero FWI raster reads as "no fire danger anywhere" when it means "no data". This library returns None for it. Each of these was found the hard way, and checked again against the live service on 2 November 2026.

Install

pip install effis-client           # perimeters
pip install "effis-client[raster]" # + FWI sampling (numpy, rasterio)

Use

The fetch functions take your httpx.AsyncClient, so timeouts, retries, proxies and connection pooling stay yours. Network errors propagate; an error disguised as a 200 raises EffisError.

import asyncio
from datetime import date

import httpx

from effis_client import fetch_fwi, fetch_perimeters


async def main() -> None:
    async with httpx.AsyncClient(timeout=60) as client:
        # Bounding boxes are (west, south, east, north), EPSG:4326.
        perimeters = await fetch_perimeters(
            client,
            (16.5, 40.3, 16.8, 40.6),
            start=date(2021, 1, 1),
            end=date(2026, 12, 31),
        )
        print(len(perimeters.features), "fires since 2021")

        fwi = await fetch_fwi(
            client,
            date(2026, 11, 1),
            points=[(16.6, 40.6)],  # (lon, lat)
            bbox=(15.0, 39.5, 17.5, 41.5),
        )
        print(fwi)  # {(16.6, 40.6): 10.34...} — or None if EFFIS has no data


asyncio.run(main())

Dates are filtered locally, because MapServer cannot filter them server side; one bbox returns the whole history (an Italian region is a few hundred perimeters, a few hundred KB). If the response hits max_features, perimeters.truncated is True: shrink the bbox rather than trusting the gap.

Bring your own HTTP

Everything the fetch functions do is also exposed as pure functions, for callers with their own HTTP layer:

from effis_client import WFS_URL, perimeters_params, parse_perimeters
from effis_client import WMS_URL, fwi_params, check_tiff, sample_fwi

Data licence

EFFIS data are © European Union, Copernicus Emergency Management Service, published under CC BY 4.0. Anything you publish from them must say so. The test fixtures are small EFFIS responses under the same licence.

Extracted from Limen, which uses the perimeters as the truth set for its wildfire backtest and the FWI rasters to check its own FWI chain (fwi-chain).

Development

uv sync
make check

License

Code: Apache-2.0.