TRAIL BLAZER
UBCO researcher and
assistant professor
Mathieu Bourbonnais
is working to develop
sensors aimed to
detect fires early on
B U S I N E S S C L I M AT E
UNDER FIRE
How new technology is changing the game
for forest firefighting in B.C.
by Jennifer Van Evra
Jennifer Van Evra is an
award-winning Vancouver
journalist, broadcaster and UBC
writing instructor.
fire got going, it was going to
jump the lake, no problem."
Those sensors, which Bour-
bonnais and his
UBCO team
are developing in partnership
with Rogers, could be a game-
changer in British Columbia.
Acting as an early warning sys-
tem, they are essentially small,
low-cost weather stations that
can be deployed across remote
locations where they can
monitor conditions—things like
air temperature, precipitation,
relative humidity, wind speed,
wind direction, soil moisture
and soil temperature. Using
cellular or satellite networks,
the real-time data can then be
transmitted to anyone from
local fire services to forestry
companies, and from utilities
to First Nations.
That data, in turn, can help
agencies determine which
areas are most at risk of fire,
model what might happen,
brief crews on the ground and
better triage and closely track
fires once they start—especially
For years, Mathieu Bour-
bonnais was the person repel-
ling out of helicopters to fight
forest fires, not the one prepar-
ing to evacuate from them.
But well before last year's
fast-moving McDougall Creek
wildfire jumped Okanagan
Lake in Kelowna, the former
wildland firefighter knew it
could get bad—not because of
anything he heard or saw, but
because of a piece of tech he
had helped to create.
"I was checking all my
sensors, and the McDougall
Creek fire burned about 15 of
them," says Bourbonnais, now
a researcher and assistant pro-
fessor of earth, environmental
and geographic sciences at
UBC
Okanagan. "Seeing that, it was
pretty obvious that once the
in more remote communities.
"Right now, we rely on a
really sparse network of very
expensive weather stations
across 63 million hectares of
forest in B.C., whereas we've
deployed almost 100 of these
sensors in the Okanagan
alone," says Bourbonnais. "So
we have a much better sense of
where the pressure points are
on the landscape."
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