Artificial Intelligence Aiding in the Fight Against Wildfires

In a report from MSN.com, researchers from the University of Ottawa and the University of Hawaii are working together to unlock AI’s potential in combating wildfires. This comes as wildfires are currently burning in Canada, Sicily, and other parts of the world.

All of this is already compounding an already hot summer for most locations. As forest researcher, Joshua Johnston, at Natural Resources Canada stated of the current conditions, “We need to be changing the way we do business,“. This is because, with current estimates, this summer has been a record breaker for wildfires. And according to Johnston, “I don’t think it will be more than 10 years before we break them all again.”

Hossein Bonakdari Engineering Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa is working with a team of fellow researchers who want to use AI in the growing fight against wildfires. The way they’re working right now. The team is putting together massive amounts of data into a machine learning program.

The data that they’re using include satellite imagery, weather data, soil moisture data, human activity, and other historical inputs. Together, the system goes on to seek out patterns based on what’s been given with the specific goal of attempting to predict the next wildfire.

This is a similar approach to a team out of California using artificial intelligence to attempt to predict landslides that were reported some time ago. As for Bonakdari, he has high hopes for AI. In his view, it can be a game changer, saying in part, “The problem of wildfires can be solved completely by the help of AI.”

In his view, the need to up the ante against wildfires is critical, “As wildfires continue to pose a growing threat to communities and ecosystems, there is an urgent need for innovative and technologically advanced approaches.”.

The hope of using data science to help in the fight against climate change is growing. For example, CARTO’s Lucia Garcia-Duarte’s upcoming webinar on using Spatial Data Science for Climate Risk Analytics hopes to harness the power of data to minimize the impact of climate change.

This growing school of thought also acknowledges some of the limitations. As Johnston noted, “There is no one system that will be a silver bullet that will fix everything…Change may not be optional, and some of this stuff might become a necessity as we move forward.”