Early detection of wildfires is becoming increasingly important, especially in countries such as Australia – in the summer of 2019-20, more than 12 million hectares, an area roughly the size of England, were impacted.
According to analysis carried out by the University of Sydney for WWF-Australia, “about 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 181 million birds, and 51 million frogs occupied areas hit by the fires.”
More than 60,000 koalas – an iconic Australian species whose entire population numbers only an estimated 300,000 adults – were killed or affected.
Now help is at hand. Scientists from the University of South Australia say they have found a way to harness satellites and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to greatly increase the rates at which wildfires are detected.
Stationary satellites located up to 34,000km above the surface of the Earth, or lower, and orbiting satellites can both detect wildfires, but they have a number of limitations. The key innovation, say scientists, is to put sophisticated AI-enabled software into tiny cube satellites (cubesats) that weigh just a few kilograms.
So far, the idea has only been modelled, says lead researcher on the project, geospatial scientist Dr Stefan Peters, it’s about to go live.
“The Kanyini cubesat [a collaboration between the Government of South Australia, a consortium of universities and various industry partners] is scheduled to be launched on 2 July, and our onboard fire smoke detection solution will become operational at the end of this year or beginning of next,” Peters says.
When it does, it should be possible to reliably detect wildfires in less than one hour, whereas current satellites can take between 6-8 hours. Using a past fire event in the Coorong of South Australia, the AI approach took less than 14 minutes to detect smoke and relay the data.
Reducing the impact of wildfires isn’t only important for millions of wild animals, as well as human lives and property, but also because of the huge release of carbon emissions.
WWF-Australia published a report following the 2019-20 wildfire season which said that somewhere between 400-700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide had been released. To put this in perspective, Australia’s annual emissions during the 12 months to June 2019 were about 500 million tonnes.
And the cost of replacing these carbon stocks was estimated at somewhere between AU$1-2.8 billion.
In the light of these statistics, investing in early detection would surely pay dividends.
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