During 2023/2024, I had the opportunity to drive around Canada a bit and was devasted at the destruction of the wildfires and wondered as a scientist what could be done to reduce them either for instant reaction for firefighters or even previous season preperation.

I designed a concept I call 'digital bees'. A small device that would be able to monitor/capture simple sensor data such as tempertature & moisture. These small devices would not communicate the data over satellite but point to point. In a distributed manner, being able to ping it's ID/location with GPS or a hardcoded location to the next node. This would allow these small devices to cover hectares of forestry for a mesh network of data. The devices would be powered with solar power and use AM radio to ping the data, the bandwidth on AM radio would be sufficient to transmit the simple data payload of it's ID, location, temperature and moisture.

These little devices data would be then sent into a mapping system that would show the temperature of the range of the forest. Temperature increases would then be alerted for when the summer is hot and dry. Then if a fire was started by a lightning or spark of some kind, the alert would be instant rather than waiting for smoke to be reported. Allowing firefighters to react faster to put the fire out.

The moisture detection in off Summer season would then allow firefighters and volunteers to better prepare the forest for better irrigation to reduce the drying out of the trees.

One cool concept I had with these digital bees were that their attenna would detangle like a spider web as they are deployed by dropping by helicopter, detangling the metal antenna in the tree as they fall. Meaning easy deployment of the digital bees across the forest.

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