Fire & Forestry Management

In the summer of 2010, we performed flight tests to determine the applicability of ARS to quickly and accurately determine the location of "hot spots" - areas that remain after a forest fire that have the potential to flare up again.  The pilot's comments were:

With your sytem we were able to stay at 1000', maintain 25 to 30 knots and the camera operator would point the gimble down at 65  degree's while marking the spots. The results were well within the needed 10 meters accuracy. The time needed to mark 7 hot spots was approximatly 30 to 40 seconds  as compared to the regular way of 5 minutes per spot times 7 = 35 minutes. All the time well above the deadman's curve.

The savings in helicopter times would more than offset the costs of the ARS and not missing some or counting a spot twice is a money saver also.

ARS can also be used to produce fire perimiter shapefiles for use with traditional GIS packages such as ESRI ArcInfo. It provides a robust set of drawing and editing tools that can operate on live video and can export the resulting data in the geographic projection of your choice.