If a tree burns in the forest and nobody sees it — there's an app for that.
Or at least, there's a new electronic alarm system called ForestGuard that Dezeen describes as "an Internet of Things for woodland."
Wildfires have been an increasing problem for decades, growing in frequency and intensity as the world gets hotter and many areas dry out. Not only is the fire itself dangerous and destructive — claiming human lives and property as well as huge areas of natural land — but it also produces smoke that is becoming a health hazard for people hundreds of miles away.
One of the biggest problems with controlling wildfires is that they often start in remote areas, where no one can see them until they get large enough to attract attention. By that point, they're already doing serious damage — and the longer they go and the larger they grow, the harder it is to get them under control.
That's why ForestGuard exists: to create an early warning system so that firefighters can reach the blaze while it's still small and manageable, Dezeen reports.
The ForestGuard team is made up of Suat Batuhan Esirger, Ecem Ertan, Onur Sertgil, and Rana Imam Esirger — all students of İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi. All of them volunteered their services to help with the 2021 Turkey wildfires, which is where the idea for ForestGuard was born.
The system uses sensors attached to the trees. It only needs one solar-powered unit to cover 16 hectares of forest, or roughly 16,000 trees, sensing temperature, humidity, air pressure, and different gases present in smoke. The units are sensitive enough to detect the difference between cigarettes, wood smoke, and car exhaust.
When the sensors pick up the signs of a wildfire, they use a satellite link to send an alert to local firefighters, dramatically improving response times. As Suat Batuhan Esirger, ForestGuard's chief technology officer, told Dezeen, the average response time dropped from 90 minutes to just 15.
For example, on the Princes' Islands archipelago in Turkey, firefighters were able to locate and extinguish a remote fire before it had even gotten larger than a dinner table.
"It was the middle of the night, there was nobody passing by, nobody to report on the fire until it got a lot bigger than when we detected it," said Esirger. "That was a huge win for us, seeing it in action."
Even better, the system can warn firefighters when the conditions are right for a fire even before any fire starts, allowing for proactive prevention. ForestGuard estimates the cost at $1 per year per 500 trees.
"We made it fire retardant as much as possible, so they will continue sending data until their last breath," said Esirger. "From that data we can predict the spread direction of that wildfire, so we can feed that data to the authorities and they can fight fire more efficiently."
ForestGuard is already hard at work in Turkey, and it may soon expand to the U.S., Australia, and France.
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