Sources

Legislation

We read the legal texts in their published or consolidated version. Nothing on this page is legal advice. The texts are in Portuguese.

• Decreto-Lei 82/2021 — the Integrated Rural Fire Management System (SGIFR): fuel-management strips (art. 49), definitions (art. 3), enforcement (art. 58), transitional rules (art. 79). Diário da República · consolidated version (PGDL)
• Decreto-Lei 124/2006 — the previous regime, still applicable in 2026 in municipalities where the PMDFCI is in force (art. 15). Consolidated version of 2019 (PDF)
• Decreto-Lei 86/2026 — extends the PMDFCI to 31 December 2026.
• Lei 18/2026 — changes the offences regime of DL 82/2021, with effect from 1 January 2026.
• Despacho 675/2026 — the ICNF regulation with the technical standards for fuel management (the three zones, pruning, shrubs), in force since 1 January 2026. Diário da República
• Despacho 3440/2026 and Despacho 7164/2026 — the 2026 deadlines. 3440/2026 · 7164/2026
• Despacho 4717/2025 — the 2025 priority parishes and the correspondence between the two regimes. PDF (SGIFR)
• Approved sub-regional programmes (PSA) — list on the SGIFR portal.

Data

Data	Source	Version	Licence	Used for
Land-cover map (COS)	Direção-Geral do Território	COS 2025	CC BY 4.0	Forest land (50 m strip) or agricultural land (10 m)
Administrative boundaries (CAOP)	Direção-Geral do Território	CAOP 2025	CC BY 4.0	Municipalities, districts, sub-regions
Land cadastre	Direção-Geral do Território	October 2026	CC BY 4.0	Parcels in municipalities with a cadastre
Georeferenced parcel outlines (RGG)	BUPi	1 October 2026	CC BY	Parcels in municipalities without a cadastre
Buildings	© OpenStreetMap contributors	October 2026	ODbL	Buildings and their type (ruin, shed…)
Buildings	Microsoft Global ML Building Footprints	—	ODbL	Buildings missing from OpenStreetMap
Places	© OpenStreetMap contributors	October 2026	ODbL	Village names
OrtoSat 2023 orthophoto (30 cm)	Direção-Geral do Território	2023	free use with attribution	Background imagery, zoomed in
Sentinel-2 cloudless	EOX IT Services (modified Copernicus Sentinel data)	2016	CC BY 4.0	Background imagery, zoomed out

Informação geográfica cedida pela Direção-Geral do Território. The building layer combines ODbL data and is therefore ODbL as well. Label fonts: Noto Sans (SIL Open Font License). Map: MapLibre GL.

Method

1. Buildings. We merge the OpenStreetMap and Microsoft outlines; where they overlap, OpenStreetMap wins. Not counted as buildings: structures under 20 m² (a stand-in for annexes, art. 49(8)) and those tagged in OpenStreetMap as a ruin, shed, garage, greenhouse, lean-to or similar.
2. Villages (built-up areas). We group buildings less than 50 m apart and keep groups of at least 10. The outline is drawn with straight segments connecting the buildings, without holes.
3. Strips. Around each building: 0–2 m, 2–10 m and 10–50 m over forest land, 0–2 m and 2–10 m over agricultural land, according to the COS. Inside villages the building strips are removed (the municipal regulation applies there). Around villages: 100 m over forest land. Each m² counts in one zone only, in the order 0–2 m, 2–10 m, then 10–50 m or the village strip.
4. Parcels. We intersect the strips with the BUPi and cadastre parcels and compute the m² in each zone, and whether the duty comes from buildings on the parcel itself or from neighbours.
5. Regime. Each municipality gets the regime of its sub-region (NUTS III): DL 82/2021 where a PSA has been approved, DL 124/2006 elsewhere.

Limits

• The COS is not the ground. The COS has a minimum mapping unit of 1 ha and dates from 2025. A small pine wood next to a house may be classed as farmland, and an abandoned field may already be scrub.
• We can’t tell which buildings are in use. Under DL 82/2021 only buildings used as a home or for an economic activity count; a closed-up house should not create a strip, and the map cannot see that. For villages we also count buildings, not dwellings.
• Not every parcel is mapped. BUPi covers about 46 % of the area of the municipalities without a cadastre. Where there is no parcel, the map shows the strips but not whose duty they are.
• Standard widths. We use 50, 10 and 100 m. A PSA may set other widths (up to ±50 %), and under the old regime the villages and the widths on non-forest land are those of each municipality’s PMDFCI, which we don’t use.
• Other people’s strips are not shown. Roads, power lines, gas pipelines and industrial sites have their own strips, cleared by the operators.
• Slope and land uses that replace clearing (annex II of the regulation) are not taken into account.

Found a mistake — a building that is a ruin, a missing house, a badly drawn village? Tell us.