Planners and researchers in Australia are expecting to implement in the coming years new technology, including drones and social media data, to assist firefighters suppressing bushfires.
The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission that studied the Black Saturday fires of 2009 said there was a need for more “forward looking research”. With predictions that the fire season that is getting started will be the busiest since 2009, firefighters are looking for additional methods to protect wildlands and the public.
Here are some excerpts from an article at sbs.com:
[Dr Allison Kealy, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Department of Infrastructure Engineering] says the coming fire seasons will see a decentralized information network, being fed with information from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), wireless sensors, improved high-resolution and real-time satellite imagery.
“It will even aggregate information from crowd-sourced data, like Twitter and Facebook.”
Her team at the University of Melbourne is partnered with the University of California in San Diego, and are working to design and build resilient streaming sensor networks for bushfire response.
[…]
The use of technology in bushfire communications has improved; for example the CFA FreReady app allows mobile users to share user-generated geo-codded images and view official, real-time warning and advisories.
But new technologies, more specifically mining hugely complex data sets provided by emerging surveillance technologies, won’t be used on the front line this summer.
“The gap has closed when it comes to the ability to share information this summer, but we need a more detailed and focused approach when it comes to the integrity of data capture, analysis and visualisation,” Dr Kealy said.
Thanks go out to Dick
