Dryad and Vodafone partner on ‘ultra-early’ detection tech to fight Spanish wildfires
As the threat of wildfires looms over power transmission lines, Dryad Networks has announced a collaboration with Vodafone to bring its ‘ultra-early’ detection tech to Spain – a wireless environmental sensor network aiming to prevent wildfires across the country.
The system can operate in forest environments where the impacts of climate change are more difficult to monitor and is hoped to reduce the percentage of areas devastated by fire.
According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), fire-affected areas in Spain rose from 84,827ha in 2021 to 306,555 ha in 2022.
These fires threaten the stability of the grid, due to their damaging effects on conductors and, thereby, transmission lines.
Aiming to prevent these wildfires, the collaboration will see Vodafone provide communications infrastructure to support Dryad’s network of sensors, Silvanet.
Dryad on the other hand, a security services start-up company based in Berlin, Germany, will be responsible for installing and maintaining the sensors and monitoring them from its operations centre.
Their wireless network of environmental, solar-powered gas sensors is based on the open standard for long-range IoT networks.
The network’s distributed architecture aims to enable large-scale deployment in areas without network coverage.
Data collected on the network is processed by machine learning tools embedded within the sensor and cloud-based data tools for analysis, monitoring and alerting.
The collaboration will aim to enable an immediate response to fire incidents with wildfires detected within minutes; alerts sent directly to the appropriate firefighting resource.
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The system will be based on an IoT deployment using 3 types of elements:
- Solar-powered gas sensors, which are installed in trees and can detect a fire during the smouldering stage.
- Mesh gateways with broad-spectrum modulation technology, to give ‘coverage’ to gas sensors and aggregate data from deployed sensors.
- Monitoring and communications systems with connectivity, which collate the information collected and send it to the cloud that manages the monitoring system.
Spain’s forest ecosystems occupy over 26 million hectares, of which almost 15 million are wooded (representing 29% of the national territory).
As such, Dryad cites the usefulness of their tech within this context, using AI embedded in the gas sensors to learn and identify the different ‘smells’ of a forest. The system can also operate in wooded areas without network coverage.
“We are very pleased to be working with Vodafone to bring our wildfire detection technology to Spain, a country that suffers greatly from forest fires,” said Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO and co-founder of Dryad.
“Our Silvanet solution represents a breakthrough in wildfire detection due to its ability to detect fires within minutes, and we look forward to further deployments in the region.”
The Silvanet solution was presented at this year’s Mobile World Congress MWC 2023 in Barcelona.
