Dual Purpose IoT Forest Management System

Dryad Networks has entered the fight against climate change. The environmental IoT startup launched Silvanet, a forest management system for ultra-early fire detection, as well as tree health and growth monitoring.

Leveraging IoT for forest management

Dryad offers private owners the sensors necessary to manage large forest acreage. The sensors ping at the smoldering stage, providing enough warning for a swift — and, more importantly, early — response. It is designed to alert officials to the presence of wildfires earlier than ever.

The company’s sensors are solar-powered, making maintenance easier and less costly. They attach safely to trees and monitor conditions by measuring air composition, temperature, humidity, and air pressure. The sensors offer low power consumption and provide affordable solutions for digitizing forest maintenance.

Artificial intelligence reads signals and learns the difference between true forest fires and other stimuli such as diesel trucks moving nearby. Silvanet uses a distributed LoRaWAN mesh gateway to support large-scale deployments of a standards-compliant LoRa network in areas without mobile network coverage. The mesh gateway increases the distance, allowing monitoring of even more acreage all on the same forest management system. As the system learns, users can detect anomalies faster and even add other sensor criteria to monitor things like tree health. Plus, a user-friendly dashboard makes getting the right information straightforward.

The system operates over the cloud and can detect early wildfires in under 60 minutes. Current satellite monitoring is much slower, and users must wait for hours or days for positive identification from smoke plumes. By that time, it’s often too late.

Fighting climate change with modern solutions

Dryad’s network will allow for monitoring in areas where mobile coverage is broken or non-existent. The company successfully tested the network in a live demonstration in a Berlin forest. The company is also working on proof-of-concept deployments worldwide, including forests in the USA, Europe, Africa, Indonesia, and Australia.

The company’s main mission is to digitize forest conservation and maintenance, making it easier for governments and private groups to monitor even the most remote parts of the forest and respond to potential challenges earlier than previous monitoring efforts allowed.