French IoT firm Kerlink and Dutch company NetOp Technology are collaborating on a wildfire-prevention system that warns public officials when weather conditions predict fires.

This summer, 187,114 fires have so far been recorded across the globe, further underlining the urgency of acting on global warming. Extreme temperatures and droughts have fuelled fires in Russia, Greece, Sicily, Algeria, Tunisia, the Amazon, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Canada and the USA, particularly in California where the Dixie Fire has been burning since mid-July and has ravaged more than 200,000 hectares. The previous record was set in September 2020 with 138,680 fires, almost 50,000 fewer.

To help identify risk areas, the LoRaWan-based system combines Kerlink Wirnet gateways with NetOp Forest Capsulesthat measure meteorological conditions such as humidity, temperature, CO₂ and the concentration of volatile organic compounds (VOC), using built-in sensors. The long-range wireless device detects, collects and reports dangerous conditions even in very remote locations via Kerlink’s LoRaWan gateways, while its AI capabilities identify likely fire outbreaks with their exact GPS location.

The system’s intelligent dashboard uses an integrated AI layer, sensors with machine-learning functions, forest fire prediction, on-line risk calculation, smart live maps of terrain, real-time heat maps and alarm scenarios.

“Our technology and Kerlink’s very wide LoRaWan coverage allow forest and wildlands managers to expand their monitoring far beyond traditional capabilities of smoke detection and early fire observation,” said Olcay Taysi, co-founder of NetOp Technology. “By predicting where fires are likely to start, the Forest Capsule system helps officials spend their monitoring and surveillance activities more effectively.”

Romain Weryk, Kerlink key account manager, added: “This delivers on the global scale by helping to anticipate climate change consequences potentially resulting in vast fires, and locally it protects wildlife and enables organisations to conserve water and other resources used in fighting fires. Kerlink’s expertise on gateways and communication management is widely recognised for the robust performance those features deliver in diverse and challenging environments, and they make Kerlink an obvious partner for this world’s-first, IoT wildfire-prevention application.”

NetOp Technology has been Kerlink’s distributor since July 2018.

Kerlink is a provider of end-to-end connectivity for designing, deploying and operating public and private LPWA IoT networks. Its portfolio includes industrial-grade network equipment, network core, operations and management software, value-added applications, and professional services, backed by R&D capabilities.

More than 140,000 Kerlink installations have been rolled out with over 350 clients in 70 countries. Based in France, with subsidiaries in the USA, Singapore, India and Japan, Kerlink is a co-founder and board member of the LoRa Alliance and the uCIFI Alliance.

NetOp Technology develops and produces hardware and SaaS based on LPWAN with a hardware management platform and software development kit for the IoT market. Its low-energy wireless cloud sensor family is modular and ready to integrate with any IoT platform with known IoT connectivity protocols. There are more than 80 different LPWAN sensors in the portfolio.