Hazard reduction burns are critical to mitigating the risk of bushfire devastation. Unfortunately undertaking these essential burns is fraught with challenges: they can be initiated only when environmental conditions—wind, temperature, humidity and the state of the vegetation to be burnt—are conducive to a successful burn and such that a burn can be undertaken safely.

These requirements can mean the windows for safe burns and short and infrequent. Conditions for a burn might be optimal on only a few days over a several years.

To add to the challenges, the onsite monitoring of environmental conditions needed to schedule a hazard reduction burn can be undertaken only infrequently in remote areas.

The capability of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to remotely monitor many environmental parameters has been exploited to improve the ability of the NSW Parks & Wildlife Service (NPWS) to identify burn ‘windows’ and schedule hazard reduction burns, in a joint project with IoT technology company and LORaWAN operator, Meshed, and the NSW Department of Planning and Environment.

The project was a finalist in the 2024 IoT Awards, the awards of Australia's peak IoT Industry body IoT Alliance Australia.

Meshed was awarded the contract with the NSW Office of Chief Scientist NSW Bushfire Response R&D Mission, under the Bushfire Technology Pilots Program. Technology partners also included ICT International for scientific IoT sensors. The customer was NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service.

The project commenced in December 2022 and is ongoing.

The program was set up following devastating bushfires in 2020, to enable businesses to trial or pilot technologies for bushfire-related applications and commercialise these technologies.

It aims to establish NSW as a global centre of bushfire-related research, innovation and technology.

The system developed by Meshed comprises sensors that gather data about a number of environmental parameters to determine conditions for a hazard reduction burn. These include weather, wind speed, rain, soil moisture, fuel moisture and normalised difference vegetation index (NVDI)—a metric for quantifying the health and density of vegetation.

Data from the sensors is reported in real time over a LORaWAN network set up by Meshed for the purpose, and then backhauled over the cellular network.

Meshed designed and installed three solar-powered sensing and LORaWAN stations. These report environmental data every 15 minutes to Meshed’s cloud dashboard where the data is analysed and visualised to help NPWS staff accurately determine the rate at which vegetation is drying out and work out the appropriate time to take additional manual measurements required before a burn can commence, something they were not previously able to do. Previously they were relying, initially, on weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology.

The sensors were customised from off-the-shelf products which stored their logged data locally, to enable them to transmit their data in real time over a LORaWAN network.

Since the initial deployment, NPWS has subsequently acquired a further six LoRaWAN gateways to expand monitoring to other areas. It could expand the system measure humidity, solar radiation and vapour pressure deficit (VPD)—the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and the amount it can hold when saturated.

NPWS could use the system to send data from the sensors to its existing response and asset management systems.

The project has saved NPWS time and money by reducing the need for physical inspection of potential burn sites and has increased NPWS staff engagement with technology partners, according to the project’s IoT Awards nomination, submitted by Meshed.