As wildfire risk has grown larger and more destructive in recent years, especially in the drought-plagued West, AI is being employed to assess wildfire risks more accurately and sound the alarm hours earlier after fire breaks out.
For example, the Nature Conservancy is using controlled burning techniques in forests in California’s Sierra Nevada susceptible to wildfires. This summer, on a 28,000-acre plot near Lake Tahoe, the group plans to test an AI program designed to assess how well the thinning plan will prevent fires.
“Nothing is going to completely replace the human brain to make decisions, but AI can help us make better decisions across a much larger area,” stated Edward Smith, forest ecology and fire manager at the Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va., in a recent account in The Wall Street Journal.
The AI program will use satellite imagery of pre- and post-thinning work to make the assessments. This has been made possible by the availability of small satellites taking more photos of forests, and powerful computers needed to process the data.
Microsoft’s launch in 2017 of “AI for Earth,” which allowed the general public access to AI tools that can be used to process data from satellites as a cloud service, gave a boost to the work. Microsoft issues some grants to help defray the cost of the research for certain issues, including wildfire prevention.
“We’re flying blind now,” stated Lucas Joppa, chief environmental officer for Microsoft. “We have no idea what the state of our national forests are in the US, yet I can point you to a coffee shop in a millisecond.”
SilviaTerra LLC of San Francisco began using the Microsoft network about a year ago to build a map of the nation’s forest based on data from satellites, including the Landsat program run by the US Geological Survey and NASA. The firm hopes to map more than 400 million acres of forest for the project, called Basemap, to help guide thinning work.
AI is helping the company do with a workforce of 10 what it would take thousands to do without. It. “One person can measure maybe 20 acres in a day,” stated Zack Parisa, co-founder of SilviaTerra. “With AI, you can do a whole forest.”
Salo Sciences of San Francisco is developing a product incorporating AI to map areas of highest wildfire risk, based on an analysis of dead and dying trees.
