The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry plans to implement artificial intelligence (AI) technology to tackle forest fires, which destroyed large swaths of land last year.
AI will be used in the Remote Smoke Detection-Early Fire Warning System developed by the ministry. It will enable a faster response to fires. Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said the technology will be used in cameras set atop watchtowers in the forests. In an interview published by Yeni Şafak newspaper on Wednesday, he stated that cameras can detect smoke from a distance up to 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) through “smoke perception,” and the new system would reduce the detection time to two minutes.
The system is currently installed in Antalya and Muğla, two Mediterranean provinces that lost hundreds of acres of forests to devastating wildfires in the summer of 2021, one of the worst and deadliest outbreaks in the region. “AI enables us to keep track of the smoke and deploy our teams as soon as possible,” Pakdemirli said.
The ministry has 76 “smart” watchtowers, entirely operated without staff and 103 towers installed with cameras. Cameras, through AI and machine learning, are able to send alarm signals to authorities, via text or multimedia message, upon detection of smoke. Every tower can scan an area of up to 50,000 hectares in two minutes and can send exact coordinates of the fire.
Forest fires, worsened by the ongoing climate crisis, are a major concern for Turkey, which has expanded its forest cover in the past two decades. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday after a Cabinet meeting that they were working to boost “infrastructure” to fight forest fires. “We will increase the number of domestically manufactured unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to eight, the number of firefighting planes to 20 and helicopters to 55,” Erdoğan said.
Turkey suffered from at least 2,105 forest fires last year, though the worst was in Antalya and Muğla. Strong winds and extreme temperatures hampered efforts to douse the fires. The country witnessed an unprecedented surge in forest fires starting from the last week of July, a period with the highest number of almost simultaneous forest fires. It took around two weeks for authorities to put out all 240 wildfires that had raged across the country forcing the evacuation of hundreds of people.