The fires went on for three relentless days in the summer of 2021, scorching over 13,000 hectares of western Sardinia. Residents “saw their whole world go up in flames around them," says Carlo Poddi, a forestry expert on the island. Although they began with a roadside car accident that was immediately reported to firefighters, the conditions—temperatures over 40°C; an ongoing drought; and strong, hot sirocco winds blowing from Africa—made the blaze difficult to stop.
Fires like those are bound to become more common and vicious in a warming world, says Mr Poddi, walking through the forest of Santu Lussurgiu, one of the areas hit that summer. So the island is preparing. As part of those preparations, Mr Poddi’s team at MEDSEA, a Sardinia-based environmental non-profit organisation, has installed 20 fire-detection sensors in the Santu Lussurgiu forest.
These are part of a pilot programme by Dryad Networks, a German forest-monitoring company, that began in 2022 and is sponsored by Vodafone, a telecoms firm. The sensors, which hang from branches three to four metres off the ground like green Christmas-tree ornaments, collect information about everything from concentrations of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to temperature, humidity, and air pressure. These data are then sent off to be analysed by bespoke artificial-intelligence (AI) models trained on data collected from forests around the world.
If any anomalies are spotted, a call for action is sent to the emergency service.
