A company that specializes in early wildfire detection has developed a new, AI-based drone that it says will help speed up the detection, location and monitoring of fires.
In Germany, you can go on foot wherever you want as long as it’s not fenced in or marked by signage, and you aren’t damaging anything. Currently, a lot of land is fenced in temporarily in some weird attempt to contain the African Swine Fever epidemic, though.
Generally, the idea of using semi autonomous drones equipped with thermal cameras for early detection of forest fires is a good idea. It’s a cost effective alternative to what is done right now. In most areas in Germany there are no dedicated resources for early detection of forest fires (only in regions of exceptional risk, there are dedicated resources, like a patrol aircraft and automated monitoring towers), so the task is mostly performed by police helicopters (the only suitable resource available) that will patrol forested areas in times of high risk. This, of course, is costly, and ties up the scarce resource of police helicopters for a task that’s not actually the job of the police.
Germany tends to have a very strict separation between police and the emergency services for historical reasons, (the details are regulated by state law, so there are some regional variations) as a result, having dedicated forest fire monitoring drones not operated by the police would in practice actually be a less intrusive measure than delegating this task to police helicopters.
Right. Not in Germany, but FWIW that tracks perfectly with what I’m aware of elsewhere in Europe and what I was referencing above. Good to know it’s not fundamentally different in the specific place we’re discussing.
In Germany, you can go on foot wherever you want as long as it’s not fenced in or marked by signage, and you aren’t damaging anything. Currently, a lot of land is fenced in temporarily in some weird attempt to contain the African Swine Fever epidemic, though.
Generally, the idea of using semi autonomous drones equipped with thermal cameras for early detection of forest fires is a good idea. It’s a cost effective alternative to what is done right now. In most areas in Germany there are no dedicated resources for early detection of forest fires (only in regions of exceptional risk, there are dedicated resources, like a patrol aircraft and automated monitoring towers), so the task is mostly performed by police helicopters (the only suitable resource available) that will patrol forested areas in times of high risk. This, of course, is costly, and ties up the scarce resource of police helicopters for a task that’s not actually the job of the police.
Germany tends to have a very strict separation between police and the emergency services for historical reasons, (the details are regulated by state law, so there are some regional variations) as a result, having dedicated forest fire monitoring drones not operated by the police would in practice actually be a less intrusive measure than delegating this task to police helicopters.
Right. Not in Germany, but FWIW that tracks perfectly with what I’m aware of elsewhere in Europe and what I was referencing above. Good to know it’s not fundamentally different in the specific place we’re discussing.