In 2020, wildfires in California burned more than 4 million acres, killing 33 people. Already this year, wildfires have burned more than 2 million acres and claimed the lives of three people, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Across the United States, 58,950 wildfires burned 10 million acres in 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. And this year, 45,339 wildfires have burned 6 million acres.
Typically, wildfires start small, but they spread quickly, destroying everything in their paths, including homes and the environment, and putting lives at risk.
Someone tosses a lit cigarette butt or doesn’t properly extinguish a campfire. Maybe lightning strikes a tree and ignites a blaze or maybe when a landscaper is mowing a customer’s lawn, the lawnmower blade creates sparks that land on dry vegetation.
For example, the 2007 Zaca Fire in Santa Barbara County, California., which burned almost a quarter million acres, started due to sparks from a grinding machine that was being used to repair a water pipe on private property.
The key to combating wildfires is early detection. And that’s where the Internet of Things (IoT) can help.
LoRa and IoT-enabled Sensors
Most wildfire detection solutions are based on optical systems using cameras mounted on poles or on satellites that detect plumes of smoke from fires rising above the tree canopy, said Carsten Brinkschulte, co-founder and CEO of Dryad Networks, a German environmental IoT startup. However, optical solutions can be hindered by the tree canopy or clouds, and they can take several hours to detect wildfires, he said.
Dryad has developed a system for early wildfire detection, dubbed Silvanet, that reduces reaction time and enables firefighters to extinguish a fire before it spreads out of control, he said.
The system, which uses solar-powered gas sensors placed in a forest, can detect wildfires within the first hour from ignition using built-in machine-learning, analyzing the gas patterns to reliably detect a fire, according to Brinkschulte.
To connect the IoT system, Silvanet provides a long-range (LoRa) wireless network that has been extended with a patent-pending mesh network architecture to cover very large areas of the forest, he said.
“Built as a general-purpose IoT network infrastructure, the Silvanet mesh network can be used by any LoRa-compliant third party sensor, opening Silvanet to health and growth-monitoring applications, such as soil-moisture, sap-flow or tree-growth monitoring, feeding valuable data into the central Silvanet Cloud Platform, providing data analytics and alerting services to Dryad’s customers,” Brinkschulte said.
Dryad has demonstrated a proof of concept in a forest in Germany, using the 1302 transceiver from Semtech Corp.
The work that Dryad Networks is doing is important, said Marc Pégulu, vice president, IoT strategy and products at Semtech, a founding member of the LoRa Alliance.
“Semtech, as an organization, is committed to making the world better by driving innovation forward and our collaboration with Dryad is another example of this,” he said. “Living in California myself, I know too well the devastation that wildfires have on our planet. Dryad’s sensors utilizing our Semtech LoRa devices, have the ability to limit the impact of this devastation by safely, securely and remotely monitoring the forests for any potential danger.”
The LoRaWAN standard is ideal for this implementation because of its long-range, low-power offering, ensuring that even in the most wooded, secluded or remote areas connectivity is always-on and always ready to alert authorities of changes in temperature, humidity and air pressure, for example, Pégulu said.
Source: Linda Rosencrance, 13th October 2021, “IoT’s Role in Wildfire Detection” – https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/10/13/iots-role-in-wildfire-detection-2/
