Because the planet warms because of human-caused climate change, damage from wildfires has increased with it. The quantity of forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, in keeping with the National Integrated Drought Information System.
While constructing tech to slow the progression and impacts of climate change could be ideal, it’s an enormous, costly problem that impacts every industry and wishes adaptive answers within the more near term. Vibrant Planet looks to be certainly one of those solutions. The startup digitizes land mapping and uses AI to assist its users — fire departments and government bureaus — higher manage land and in addition higher prepare for potential climate incidents like wildfires.
Vibrant Planet founder and CEO Allison Wolff recently said on TechCrunch’s Found podcast that despite how crucial proper land management is to food security, human safety and the protection of biodiversity and natural resources, the industry remains to be largely stuck on paper maps that aren’t at all times accurate. This analog approach makes playing out certain climate disasters or events, and planning for them, very difficult.
Wolff said Vibrant Planet, sold as an annual subscription, solves this problem by bringing all the things online and using AI to make it easier and faster for its users to see how potential disasters and events could unfold.
“We’ve mainly brought this very powerful cloud-based, data-driven system together to enable that to occur in real time,” Wolff said. “[It’s] very collaborative with spatially overlapped plans.”
Moving the mapping online also allows organizations to work together on land management solutions that work for everybody. Indigenous tribes can share their knowledge of how their ancestors cared for an area or land, while conservationists can explain what species on a plot of land have to be protected, and fire chiefs can speak about fire risk.
The system also allows these groups to check out different treatments for land — like controlled fires or removing certain trees or vegetation — to see how it would impact the land’s resilience in order that they can discover a plan that works one of the best for all parties involved.
Wolff never thought she’d change into a startup founder, but she told Found that the problems Vibrant Planet want to solve were too big for her to disregard.
“Vibrant Planet is a science and technology platform that’s creating what we call a standard operating picture for wildfire resilience and nature resilience,” Wolff said. “We’re form of taking the term ‘common operating picture’ from the military, and from firefighting. And it’s form of the way it sounds, it means urgency. It’s critical, coordinated decisions. And we’re using it within the natural resource management and wildfire resilience constructing space, because we have now to, it’s very urgent.”
