In the last two years alone, we have witnessed devastating fires in countries like Greece and Portugal with holidaymakers evacuated from many favourite destinations and businesses and homes consumed in minutes. This may seem like a problem the UK doesn’t need to worry about, but wildfires are already beginning to appear in the UK as a result of climate change. Our wetter winters are fuelling growth that provides the ideal conditions for summer fires. And it’s not just forests that are at risk. Rare moorland habitats are very susceptible to wildfires too, which is why the National Trust has been trialling early detection methods on Marsden Moor in West Yorkshire.
Impacts of wildfires
Many wildfires start on the wildland-urban interface - in other words, they start in places close to human infrastructure and people. A good UK example of this is the 2022 wildfires in Dagenham and Wennington in East London. Fortunately, no lives were lost, but many homes, shops, vehicles and acres of farmland were destroyed.
Wildfires pose a life-threatening danger to the firefighters deployed to tackle the blazes. Attempting to control and extinguish wildfires costs billions; a study by University College London found that California’s 2018 wildfires alone cost the US $148.5 billion. Capital losses and health costs within the state amounted to an additional $59.9 billion.
Detection difficulties
Wildfires can spread at a speed of up to 14.27 miles per hour, so it doesn’t take long for a tiny fire to become an uncontrollable monster. This is why early detection is so important.
The traditional forms of detection have been towers, cameras and satellites. All have advantages and limitations. By the time a fire is large enough for the smoke to have risen above the tree canopy and be spotted from a tower (by a human or a camera), it is already well established and becoming difficult to tackle. And a fire has to be fairly large before a satellite will ‘see’ it, and unless the satellite is geosynchronous it may not come into range until the fire is already out of control.
Advances in technology
Dryad has developed sensors that can be placed in the forest (or other habitats) and can ‘smell’ tiny quantities of smoke, allowing even a small smouldering pile of leaves to be detected well before it turns into a giant fire. The sensors send an alert and can give an exact location helping fire fighters reach the spot as fast as possible.
There is often scant mobile coverage in large forests or on remote hills covered with rare heathland, yet this is exactly where we need it if the early detection methods are to work efficiently. Silvanet is a mobile network for the trees: the Internet of Trees. With solar-powered Gateways placed at regular intervals, the sensors can speak to each other and send their data out of the forest to the people who need to receive it and take action. This doesn’t mean you can use your mobile deep within the forest, but it does mean the forest can ‘talk’ to the outside world and let it know if a fire is starting.
Calculating fire risk levels by considering various sources of information (satellites, weather stations and potentially local sensors) and then mapping the risk is a complex and tedious task. But it can be automated and enhanced in accuracy and resolution with the help of AI.
If a fire can be detected quickly, then the number of people and the amount of equipment needed can be reduced considerably. Something the size of a bonfire is easily contained by a single team and one truck, but once you have acres of trees aflame, it can require hundreds of people and dozens of fire trucks, plus aerial support.
This can be compounded by accessibility. Even when a fire is spotted in the very early stages, it can take time for the fire crews to reach it. It could be in a remote location, or in a landscape that is difficult to traverse – perhaps vehicles can’t reach the spot. There are many reasons why a fire, even one we know about, can still get ‘out of hand’.
Drones could provide the solution. Fires could be caught quickly, safely and (relatively) cheaply. Dryad has recently received €3.8 million EU grant funding to develop drones with this capability and hopes to have the first working units available in the next 2-3 years. This could mark a genuine game changer in the fight against the destruction of wildfires.
Carsten Brinkschulte is CEO at Dryad Networks
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