EBERSWALDE: Brandenburg, the German region most affected by forest fires, is testing sensors that can sniff out a wildfire minutes after it starts.
Juergen Mueller used extremely combustible pine branches as kindling to coax flames from a fire pit in the middle of the Eberswalde forest northeast of Berlin. The first smoke curls into the air after not much time has passed.
The 69-year-old retired forestry specialist is here to test a green-and-black solar-powered device to identify gases released at a fire’s initial smoldering stage. Mueller co-founded Berlin start-up Dryad Networks, which produced the devices two years ago.
Bosch, a German engineering company, built ultra-sensitive gas sensors for the gadgets. The sensors are affixed to trees, and Mueller compared them to “an electronic nose” that keeps track of temperature, humidity, and air pressure.
He said that they can spot a fire before it becomes an open fire in ten to fifteen minutes, which is quicker than standard surveillance methods.
The sensor uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between, for instance, the emissions from a passing diesel truck and the beginnings of a wildfire. Mueller teaches the apparatus to recognize various wildfire kinds at his lab in Eberswalde by exposing it to smoke from multiple types of wood shavings. The sensor gains knowledge of “what the smoke from a beech or pine forest smells like,” he said. The information is transmitted to a cloud-based monitoring system when a fire is discovered, and the fire authorities are notified.
400 sensors to detect forest fires
Approximately 400 sensors, or one device per hectare (2.5 acres), have been installed in the Eberswalde forest as part of a pilot project with the municipality to evaluate the dependability of the early-warning system. According to Dryad Networks, ten nations, including the US, Greece, and Spain, are already testing the device. Last year, the business sold about 10,000 of the gadgets. It hopes to have 120 million deployed all over the world by 2030.
AFP/APP—
