One of the great problems that plagues all kinds of countries, such as Spain, during the summer season is the problem of forest fires, thousands of hectares of land are devastated year after year. Due to this and to try to prevent this type of problem and even to help its early detection, many teams of researchers are working on designing and creating valid proposals.
On this occasion I want to present you one where it is sought to be able to design a project where it is possible, using drones, to monitor forest areas to generate risk maps. For this, it will be necessary to use sensors on the ground and data capture so that the health of a certain site can be recorded and thus prevent the spread of fires, even if they are caused by human activities.
Using drones can go a long way in preventing forest fires.
To try to understand much better what is being worked on today, I want you to read the words of the researcher Roberto Barragan Campos, project manager:
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 a lot of work to be done, an example is that we are currently working with a commercial drone that, as has been verified, may not be the best option since it would be much more ideal use an airplane.
This update is for a little later because there are other processes that must be improved, such as obtaining measurements of the vegetation with the current instrumentation that makes the project too slow.