Tamil Nadu: Unmanned vehicles to fight forest fires

CHENNAI: With the rising mercury due to climate change causing more and more forest fire incidents, the State Forest Department has decided to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to identify and control forest fires.

Once implemented, the UAVs will play a critical role in verifying forest fire alerts through real-time visuals and relaying spatial coordinates to ground teams and command centres.

The UGVs will be designed with firefighting functionalities such as high-pressure water cannons and fire-retardant dispensers. These will also play a vital role in mop-up operations and assessing fire impacts in the aftermath of an incident.

“The State Forest Department is increasingly challenged by frequent and intense forest fires, especially in ecologically fragile zones where traditional firefighting methods pose a risk to human life and are often inefficient due to difficult terrain,” a forest department document said.

The department believes that the technology-driven solution is designed to improve forest fire preparedness, real-time response and post-incident analysis capabilities. “The overall goal is to minimise fire damage, reduce ecological loss, and strengthen the department’s disaster management infrastructure through innovative and sustainable technology. The UAVs will be equipped with high-resolution RGB and thermal sensors to perform continuous aerial surveillance over fire-prone regions. These aerial platforms will assist in the pre-fire phase by monitoring vulnerability zones identified using fire probability models derived from spatial and historical datasets,” the document explained.

Moreover, the department will conduct training programmes to build operational capacity within the department and forest personnel across divisions will be trained in the operation, basic maintenance and troubleshooting of UAVs and UGVs. It will deploy UAVs and UGVs on a pilot basis to assess the system’s operations effectiveness. Upon successful evaluation, phased deployment will be carried out across the vulnerable forest regions in the state.

Meanwhile, in the present calendar year, Tamil Nadu has recorded 111 large forest fire incidents between February 6 and May 11.

As per the India State of Forest Report 2023, around 96 sq km of TN’s forest cover and scrub are very highly fire prone, and more than 690 sqkm of the green cover is highly fire prone. Around 1,700 sqkm forest areas are moderately fire prone. In 2022-23, as many as 1,998 forest fires were detected and in 2023-24, the number went up to 3,380.

Also, the data shows that the number of forest fire incidents in tiger reserves in TN have increased many-fold from 2019-20 to 2023-24.

In 2019-20, the forest fire detection system detected 77 forest fires in Anamalai Tiger Reserve. But the detection had increased to 500 in 2023-24. In Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, the number of forest fire detections went up from 5 to 95 during the period.