Review of wildfire detection using social media

•We study the role of human-centric sensor information in large area fires.•We describe social media methods applicable in wildfire management.•Existing social media disaster management systems are discussed.•A general architecture of a wildfire social sensor platform is proposed.

With the introduction of social networks and services, there has been an increase of information sharing on the Internet. The availability of Internet capable mobile devices equipped with various sensors has simplified and liberalized the generation of large amounts of multimedia data. Because of this, social media has played a critical role in disaster events over the last few years. This paper gives a review of current systems and methods that enable the use of social media as a human-centric sensor in large scale disaster events. We focus particularly on wildfire use-cases and discuss the approaches from other hazard management systems which could be applied in the domain of large area fires. Furthermore, we suggest a general social sensor based platform for wildfire detection and management, and propose possible directions of future research.