One of the major problems plaguing countries like Spain during the summer months is forest fires , which devastate thousands of hectares of land year after year. Because of this, and in an effort to prevent these fires and aid in their early detection, numerous research teams are working to design and develop effective solutions.
This time, I want to present a project that aims to use drones to monitor forest areas and generate risk maps . This will require the use of ground-based sensors and data collection to record the health of a given site and thus prevent the spread of fires, even those caused by human activity.
Using drones can go a long way in preventing forest fires.
To better understand what is being worked on today, I want you to read the words of researcher Roberto Barragán Campos , who is in charge of the project:
The drones would be used for the acquisition of information through images, through multispectral photographs and the visualization of vegetation and accumulation of leaves, as well as orography of the place. All together, it helps us to generate a risk index map where we identify the regions most prone to forest fires with colors.
It would be a network of approximately one thousand sensors installed at different points on the ground. The information will be stored in a central node and will be monitored from the university or another place; the drones would also collect the information from those devices.
At the moment there is still much work to be done, an example of which is that we are currently working with a commercial drone which, as has been proven, may not be the best option since it would be much more ideal to use an airplane.
This update will be postponed for a little while longer because there are other processes that need improvement, such as obtaining vegetation measurements with the current instrumentation, which makes the project too slow.