Forest fires: proactive and reactive surveillance employing in-situ, aerial, and space technology

Employing technological advances in communications along with the available aerial and space platforms can enable us, to setup a safety monitoring and management system for delivering proactive and reactive surveillance of our forests. This work stresses the importance of protecting our forests considering the socioeconomic impact they have on our world. It also outlines the available platform technologies and proposes a tool for setting up a monitoring system that employs current technologies. This tool simulates forest fires and uses wireless sensors to monitor the fire. Results show that the number and the location of the sensors in a forest are critical in increasing the chances of sensing the fire on time. Since positioning sensors in an organized manner within a forest is tedious if not impossible to implement, it is recommended that areas with higher flammability are equipped with greater number of sensors.