Editor's note
Fire satellites just went operational.
Two of this week's stories mark the moment orbital fire detection stopped being a demo. A constellation wired into a national fire service, and serious money behind the next one. The space layer is, for practical purposes, solved.
What is not solved is the last kilometre. A state can plug a satellite feed into its fire agency, and a large forest company can build its own analytics on top of one. The hundreds of thousands of small private owners who hold much of Scandinavia's forest can do neither, and today the alert chain stops one step short of the person who owns the trees. That interpretation layer is an open gap in the market. I develop the argument in Thursday's LinkedIn post.
More from a slow but not silent news summer next week.
Axel
Bezos Earth Fund puts $26 million behind FireSat's first wildfire satellites
The grant, the largest single philanthropic commitment to wildfire detection so far, funds launch and operations of the constellation's first three satellites, built by Muon Space for the Earth Fire Alliance. The full system is designed to spot a fire of 15 by 15 feet anywhere on Earth within an hour.
Greece switches on the first satellite-based national firefighting system
The four OroraTech thermal satellites Greece sent up in May (covered in #044) are now fully wired into the Hellenic Fire System, making Greece the first country to run its national fire response on live satellite data. The sensors flag new blazes as small as four metres across.
Skogforsk measures stem sweep from the harvester before the tree falls
Sweep is the most common reason pine logs get rejected at Swedish sawmills, and today the only instrument is the operator's eye. A new study from Skogforsk, SLU, RISE and Komatsu Forest shows a harvester-mounted laser scanner can measure sweep on standing trees well enough to change the bucking decision.
Ecobase follows its Verra registration with Forestry OS, management software for Swedish foresters
Ecobase's European IFM project, 563,589 hectares across Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, is now registered with Verra as project 5315, with first credits expected before year end. On the back of it, the company is building Forestry OS, planning software that puts stand maps, work orders and mobile field access in one place for Swedish forest managers, on the same data foundation as its carbon projects. First release is set for September.