AI-based Wildfire Prevention, Detection and Suppression System

Wildfires pose a serious threat to the world’s en- vironment. The global wildfire season length has increased by 19% and severe wildfires have besieged nations around the world. Every year, forests are burned by these wildfires, causing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Therefore, there is a need for a system which prevents, detects, and suppresses wildfires. The AI-based Wildfire Prevention, Detection and Suppression System (WPDSS) is a novel, fully-automated, end-to-end, AI-based so- lution to effectively predict hotspots (areas where wildfires can start) and detect wildfires, deploy drones to spray fire retardant, preventing and suppressing wildfires. WPDSS consists of four steps. 1) Pre-processing: WPDSS loads real-time satellite data from NASA and meteorological data from NOAA of vegetation, temperature, precipitation, wind, soil moisture, and land cover for prevention. For detection, it loads the real-time data of Land Cover, Humidity, Temperature, Vegetation, Burned Area Index, Ozone, and CO2. It uses the process of masking to eliminate not-hotspots and not-wildfires such as water bodies, and rainfall. 2) Learning: The AI model consists of a random forest classifier, a type of supervised machine learning, which uses a series of decision trees to make an accurate decision. It is trained using a labeled dataset of hotspots/wildfires and not-hotspots/not- wildfires. 3) Identification of hotspots and wildfires: WPDSS runs the real-time data through the model to automatically identify hotspots and wildfires. 4) Drone deployment: The drone flies to the identified hotspot/wildfire location. WPDSS attained a 98.6% accuracy in identifying hotspots and a 98.7% accuracy in detecting wildfires. WPDSS will reduce the impacts of climate change, protect ecosystems and biodiversity, avert huge economic losses, and save human lives. The power of WPDSS developed can be applied to any location globally to prevent and suppress wildfires, reducing climate change.