Testing the next generation of wildfire tech: Interview with XPRIZE Foundation’s Andrea Santy

Detailed summary

How do you detect and mitigate destructive wildfires? That question was at the heart of an $11 million competition that culminated recently after four years. In 2023, the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation launched the XPRIZE Wildfire competition to identify innovative technologies that could detect and respond to wildfires. The competition focused on two tracks: satellite-based detection […]

That question was at the heart of an $11 million competition that culminated recently after four years.

In 2023, the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation launched the XPRIZE Wildfire competition to identify innovative technologies that could detect and respond to wildfires. The competition focused on two tracks: satellite-based detection of small fires across large landscapes, and autonomous detection, navigation, and suppression of wildfires without human intervention.

“We have been seeing more destructive fires,” Andrea Santy, executive director of the foundation’s wildfire program, told Mongabay in a video interview. “The fire season isn’t any longer just a season. It was becoming year-round.”

The competition’s final round of testing took place earlier this year. The space-based wildfire detection aspect of the competition required participants to detect fires across a large landscape in Australia within 10 minutes. The autonomous response part, meanwhile, tested the ability of teams to detect and suppress a fire in rural Alaska within 10 minutes of it starting.

While no one team claimed the grand prize in either of the tracks, Santy said the whole journey left her with a “huge amount of confidence that the technology over the past several years has been developing.”

The competition now enters a phase where XPRIZE will work with the teams to translate the technologies into scalable solutions that can be deployed for real-world applications.

Andrea Santy spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor about the technologies on display, the challenges that popped up during testing, and how XPRIZE plans to take the work forward. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: How would you describe XPRIZE Wildfire to someone who hasn’t heard about it before?

Andrea Santy: Our elevator pitch is that XPRIZE Wildfire is a four-year, $11 million competition to spur innovation for wildfire technology.

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