Forest fires play a critical role in landscape transformationvegetation succession, soil degradation and air quality. Improvements in fire risk estimation are vital to reduce the negative impacts of fire. This paper defines a conceptual scheme for fire risk assessment, as well as methods for data generation based on remotely sensed and geographic information system techniques. It presents proposals for their integration into synthetic risk indices, and provides a first validation exercise on several study regions in Spain. All variables were mapped at 1 sq km spatial resolution, and were integrated into a web-mapping service system. This service was active in the summer of 2007 for semi-operational testing of end-users.