The War on Wildfires Is Going High-Tech

Startups are using everything from chemistry to satellites and artificial intelligence to detect and prevent fires turbocharged by global warming.

Author of the article:

Bloomberg News

William Ralston

Published Dec 24, 2024  •  7 minute read

Emergency wildfire operations in the Aveiro region of Portugal in September. Photo by Brais Lorenzo /Photographer: Brais Lorenzo/Bloo

(Bloomberg) — Last December, a farmer was burning dry grapevines in his vineyard in Deir Mar Moussa, a hill town a dozen miles east of Beirut known for its 18th century monastery and stands of pine forest. Usually this would be dangerous, given that Lebanon’s hot and dry climate can quickly turn a spark into a conflagration.

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But on this day the worst was avoided. A device made by a German startup “smelled” the smoke from the farmer’s fire and sent out an alert, allowing authorities to prevent it from spreading. Given the recent explosion of global warming-fueled wildfires across the globe, quick detection is needed more than ever. In this case, a device called Silvanet by Dryad Networks identified the unique gas patterns in the air which indicated something in Deir Mar Moussa was burning.

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As the average global temperature rises and climate change advances, wildfires are becoming more catastrophic, ravaging communities and releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Burning leaves and undergrowth can go undetected for hours, even days, until smoke is reported to authorities by bystanders or passing aircraft. 

Since many forest fires smolder long before flames erupt, there’s an opening for a new generation of smoke detection equipment. Dryad’s chief executive, Carsten Brinkschulte, calls his an electronic nose. “If you get to a wildfire when it’s tiny, you have a lot more options that you can do than if you detect it when it’s two, three, five hectares in size,” he says. “It’s very hard to contain at that point.”

And as a logical extension of this, the nascent industry is already drawing up plans for squadrons of firefighting drones that some day may be permanently stationed among the trees, waiting for a signal to quench a fire before it can spread.

Annually, wildfires result in an additional 23,000 square miles of lost tree cover than was the case in 2001—an area slightly bigger than Croatia. Hundreds die in wildfires each year while almost a half-million more lose their homes or are displaced. Each wildfire releases dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere that can increase chances of disease and death hundreds or even thousands of miles away. A study published in October estimated more than 10,000 additional people died each year in the 2010s than in the 1960s as a result of wildfire smoke.

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And of course the more smoke, the worse global warming becomes. According to a study published in the journal Nature, wildfires in Canada last year released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, more than the annual fossil fuel emissions of any country save China, the US and India. Since 2001, carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires have surged by 60%. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, the destruction they wreak on fauna and vegetation can have dire consequences for ecosystems and the scorched landscape left behind.

Read More: The Race to Save the American Landscape One Seed at a Time It was in 2018, a particularly bad year for wildfires, when Brinkschulte—a veteran German telecommunications executive—says it occurred to him that existing detection methods weren’t keeping up. Satellites can detect wildfires from space and cameras can survey areas susceptible to outbreaks, but in both cases fires must already be large enough to produce visible smoke plumes or flames that breach the forest canopy.  

Brinkschulte says he wanted to create a system that senses fires before they escalate with “a scalable, sustainable business model.” Each of Dryad’s Silvanet sensors is equipped with a metal oxide semiconductor layer that reacts with gases in the air. When hydrogen, carbon monoxide and other gases are present, as they are in the early stages of a fire, they alter the sensor’s electrical resistance, creating a specific “fingerprint,” according to Brinkschulte. AI then analyzes the gas composition in real time. Dryad says the system allows users to geolocate the origin of a fire down to a 320-foot radius of each device.

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Dryad is by no means alone in this field. The US Department of Homeland Security has deployed sensors made by Rockville, Maryland-based N5. Called N5SHIELD, they’re now deployed across the Hawaiian island of Maui—which suffered a catastrophic fire last year. Dryad meanwhile says it has raised €22.8 million ($23.8 million), mainly through venture capital equity investments and grants from the European Union. Silvanet is its core product, with more than 20,000 sensors shipped to date. Each one sells for less than $100 each, but customers must also pay a service fee for access to the company’s cloud-based platform.

The company says it has more than 100 customers in 20 countries, with buyers being mostly local governments and municipalities. In the US, California’s state fire prevention agency has been testing 400 of Dryad’s sensors in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest, about 160 miles north of San Francisco.

One concern with sensor technology however is accuracy. If they’re too sensitive, it may lead to false alerts. And while networks of individual detectors strapped to trees are useful along hiking paths and powerlines traversing wooded areas, where fires often begin, they are less effective elsewhere. To quickly detect small fires across broader areas, you need cameras.

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In Tourrettes-sur-Loup, a village in the south of France, special cameras developed by a Polish company called SmokeD were recently tested. The device takes pictures every few seconds, using AI to simultaneously compare each photo as part of a continuous monitoring system.

Cameras, however, require substantial infrastructure, like elevated mounting points and continuous power sources—all of which limits their scalability, especially in remote areas. And the equipment itself can be a fire hazard. There is however new satellite technology coming online that may make orbiting platforms more useful in detecting hard-to-reach fires. Traditional satellite systems often struggle to detect wildfires in their early stages because geostationary satellite need to be tens of thousands of miles above the equator, limiting their ability to capture images with enough resolution.

A low earth-orbiting satellite allows for high resolution imagery, but it’s not going to scan the same spot of the earth frequently enough. You need a large number of them in order to get the time it takes to acquire images of the same location down to a level where it’s useful, says Christopher Van Arsdale, climate & energy lead at Google Research. 

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In September, Van Arsdale’s team announced FireSat, a purpose-built constellation of satellites designed to detect small-scale fires on a global scale. Groups including Google.org and the Moore Foundation are funding a non-profit called Earth Fire Alliance to launch them. By 2028, FireSat says it plans to have a constellation of 52 satellites in place, each with thermal infrared sensors that can identify potential fires in almost any weather conditions.

“It’s not the detection that’s the game changer, it’s the ability to change how we manage the fires.”

The high-resolution imagery of the entire planet will refresh every 20 minutes, and the system will be able to capture a fire about as small as a school classroom anywhere within this time period, according to the company. The first satellite is scheduled to go up early next year.

Another German startup, this one called OroraTech, is working on a similar system. The company has already launched two satellites, according to Thomas Grübler, OroraTech’s chief strategy officer and co-founder, and the goal is to launch 98 more before 2028. With 100 satellites, says Grübler, the company will be able to detect a 13-by-13 feet fire globally within 30 minutes or less.

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In June, Greece’s Ministry of Digital Governance awarded OroraTech with a €20 million ($21 million) contract to use its satellite-based early warning system for wildfires. Grübler envisions a world where they combine data with FireSat, providing “even faster detection capabilities.”

Dryad hopes to move beyond detection to firefighting, launching autonomous drones that respond to fires like the one that almost happened in Deir Mar Moussa. “We are in a unique position where we detect fires so early, so the drones have a chance of extinguishing them because the fire is so small,” Brinkschulte says.

In areas where wildfires break out regularly, drones using new fire suppression technology could be stationed permanently, ensuring a rapid, automated response. In October 2024, Dryad was awarded a €3.8 million grant from the European Regional Development Fund and raised an additional €2.5 million in funding from climate-tech investor First Imagine! to help it develop this new endeavor, called Florian.

The startups all seem to agree the best of all possible worlds is to use these various technologies together. According to Kate Dargan, a senior advisor for the Moore Foundation’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative, the stream of data acquired from satellites can inform future mitigation and protection measures. “It’s not the detection that’s the game changer, it’s the ability to change how we manage the fires,” she says.

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But Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, cautions against focusing too much on fire detection technologies. While there’s no question that early and accurate detection can help contain certain fires, it’s only true if you have the resources to use the information effectively. And in the right conditions, such as when it’s windy, some fires will spread however early you detect them. “No amount of rapid detection is going to change tactics or outcome on some fires,” he says.

Wara says detection technologies will result in extinguishing the slow-spreading fires more quickly, but may leave fast-spreading fires with more vegetation to fuel their explosive growth. If we’re going to have these satellite technologies and cameras and sensors, we need to also invest in controlled burns, he says. “The risk is that we focus too much on detection but we must not overlook mitigation and prevention,” Wara says.

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