Why BurnBot?
Worldwide, wildfires are becoming more destructive and costly, with cascading impacts on forest health, community well-being, and public infrastructure.
Increasingly destructive wildfire behavior has been attributed to excessive fuel loads in forests and the Wildland-Urban Interface – an outcome of a century-old fire suppression strategy coupled with a warming climate.
Prescribed burns
There is now an increasing recognition that prescribed burns are an effective fuel management strategy resulting in an emerging policy emphasis on using more ‘good fire’ on public lands by bolstering and developing the capacities of a prescribed burning workforce. This policy commitment has yielded long overdue recognition of the need to forge partnerships with tribal leaders to enhance knowledge and capacities for prescribed burning.
So what’s the problem?
While there is emerging consensus around the need for greater capacity and a larger, well-trained workforce for prescribed burns, it remains unclear how policy changes can scale to meet the need to treat 234 million acres of high-fire-risk forests from today’s current capacity of 3 million acres. There are also tactical issues with making prescribed burns safer, cleaner, and cheaper.
High risk, low access
Even with a larger and more skilled prescribed burn workforce, prescribed burns still run the risk of escaped fires, smoke hazards, and resulting carbon emissions, while placing the burden of hiring burn crews on private landowners, many of whom are low-income, elderly, or disabled.
Prohibitive restrictions
Prescribed burns are also dependent on short and fast-changing burn windows and have restrictions based on terrain, ecology, and landscape conditions.
Complex process
Prescribed burns today require extensive pre-planning, including identifying sites, creating fire breaks, and then igniting large areas by hand using drip torches, monitoring the burn as it spreads on its own with little to keep the spread in check, and finally ensuring that all fire and embers are extinguished.