Tag: Wildfire technology

Innovative projects that pair local communities with fire, technology and environmental industry experts have been announced as winners of the Fire Grand Challenge.

The Fire Grand Challenge is a competition to advance practical tools and approaches for wildfire mitigation, response, and landscape recovery. The organisers say the finalists were selected from a worldwide cohort of teams, with the winners sharing a $200,000 prize purse to support continued development.

The challenge only began in 2025 but received 92 technical applications and over 50 place-based community applications, from 20 countries represented in the teams. The final 12 teams advanced, each pairing a technical innovator with a local community partner, to validate solutions grounded in both leading-edge technology and place-based knowledge.
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Each finalist team received a $50,000 field-testing grant, and for nine months worked alongside land managers, fire experts, and local partners to demonstrate their solutions through controlled burns, flight trials, and rigorous technical assessments. Field tests were conducted in fire-prone landscapes, from the forests of British Columbia to the dry ecosystems of Chiapas, Mexico.

The winners are:

• Grand Prize Winner: Vibrant Planet Data Commons (Colorado, US) and the Kalispel Tribe of Indians (Washington, US). The winning team produced an AI-powered decision support tool to assist community planning for fire mitigation and restoration.

The tech was developed side-by-side with the local community, as Joel Adams of the Kalispel Tribe in Washington state explains.

“Fire is vital for fuels reduction, for bringing back some of our cultural resources. Fire has a huge role in managing land for the Kalispel tribe.”

“Utilising the outcomes and the story that will be told will allow not only myself but the Kalispel tribe to go for other grants, other funding opportunities. I see this as a way to kind of share our experience with other tribes in the northwest region and other regions across the nation.”

• Runner-Up: International Savanna Fire Management Initiative (Victoria, Australia) and BIOMASA AC (Chiapas, MEX) – This team used a process called Emissions Reduction Traditional Fire Management (ERTFM), a system adopted from the work of Charles Darwin University researchers working with Indigenous groups in northern Australia. The system promotes early dry season burns, that are less destructive than late dry season fires. The team used geospatial information systems and local knowledge in the field in Mexico, in a model that is more financially sustainable that current practices and has the potential to generate income for local communities through carbon abatement schemes.

• Runner-Up: Flash Forest Inc. (Ontario, Canada) & Grand County Wildfire Council (Colorado, USA) – Forest regeneration technology guided by AI software that uses drones to distribute seed pods for replanting. Five years after the East Troublesome Fire in Colorado, the community expected to see young trees and seedlings – but in parts of Grand County, they were surprised to find little to no natural regeneration. This team field tested post-wildfire reforestation at a large scale, using technology – including drones – to help restore burned landscapes and improve wildfire resilience by planting for biodiversity and more fire-resistant species.

The Fire Grand Challenge has partners including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, The Coca-Cola Foundation, Esri, and Planet, among others.

For more information about the Fire Grand Challenge and the winning teams, visit www.conservationxlabs.com.

The United States’ wildland firefighting force was called the “very best 1990s firefighters” during a congressional hearing on Thursday morning.

San Bernardino County Fire Protection District Chief Dan Munsey, speaking at a hearing held at the House Committee on Natural Resources, said it’s a misnomer to say the US has the most “technologically advanced” firefighting force, since firefighters on the ground are using paper maps and radios from decades ago, compared with the modern technology available to the general public today. Munsey attributed the failure to use modern technology to federal barriers.

“We are slow to innovate, we are burdened by the regulatory process, we are hampered by lengthy bureaucratic procurement processes, and we lack access to fundamental tools,” Munsey said. “We don’t have a technology problem in the United States to combat wildfire; we have a technology adoption problem.”

Lawmakers invited wildfire technology experts to Capitol Hill to start fixing the problem Munsey spoke on. Thursday’s hearing focused on advancing innovative technology for forest management and wildfire prevention. Although some portions were overshadowed by partisan back-and-forths over whose fault the current wildland fire crisis is, lawmakers shared a common goal of adopting more technological advancements to meet the crisis and prevent future tragedies.

The wildfire technology sector continues to grow, including the launch of the Association of Firetech Innovation, which claims to be the first trade association dedicated to supporting technology focused on wildfire prevention, mitigation, and response. The association plans to act as a “central force for policy engagement, investment, and industry collaboration,” and was meeting with congressional leaders as the hearing went on.

One of the association’s founding member CEOs, Allison Wolff with Vibrant Planet, was also a speaker at the hearing and released research showing how a federal investment of $9 million in wildfire risk mitigation treatments would have slowed January’s Eaton Fire enough to mitigate much of the $40 billion in damages the community of Altadena experienced from the fire.

Data analyzed by Vibrant Planet found 300 communities in eight states have a 98% to 100% wildfire risk, similar to Altadena. Wolff also estimated that investing between $40 billion to $73 billion in risk mitigation in communities similar to Altadena, the nation can avoid up to $435 billion in insured losses.

“The problem is that today, without modern tools like ours, it can take three, five, to even 10 years to get to an implementation plan,” Wolff said. “Often, the data is low-quality, and collaborators are often planning on paper. Plans are often obsolete by the time they hit print because the landscape has already burned.”

Many Democratic lawmakers pointed out that the Trump administration’s recent budget cuts to research and development at the United States Forest Service and the Department of the Interior would further slow getting new technologies into firefighters’ hands. Karen Howard, director of science and technology assessment at the US Government Accountability Office, agreed, saying having new tools does nothing if systems aren’t in place to study and use them.

“You could have a beautiful tool that tells you where hazardous fuel reduction will be most effective, but if the agencies…don’t have the resources to conduct that hazardous fuels reduction, the model doesn’t do us a lot of good,” Howard said.