Act I
This is what is at stake
Forest, water, mountain and coast, and the communities inside them. Before any statistic, this is the thing the work is for.
Peyto Lake — Banff National Park 
Thunder Bay — Ontario 
Redwoods — California
Act II
This is what happens
The same land, a different day. In Canada, wildfire burned about 2.7 million hectares a year on average between 1994 and 2023 — across roughly 7,000 fires a year.
Two real places, both in Jasper, each captioned for what it is. We do not compose a before-and-after of one location out of photographs of two.
- ~7,000
- Wildfires a year in Canada, 1994–2023 average
- ~2.7M
- Hectares burned a year, same period
- 46%
- Of those fires started by lightning
- 83%
- Of the area burned, from those same lightning fires
The last two belong together: the ignitions people cause are far more numerous than the ones that burn the most country. Figures from Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. A national average hides very large year-to-year and regional variation.
Act III
This is why it is hard
A fire forecast is not a line on a map. It is a spread of possible futures, and the honest way to draw it is as a probability.
A forecast is a probability, not a line
Burn-probability contours are routinely misread as a predicted daily fire boundary. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is dangerous.
The data does not agree with itself
Canada's and the United States' national fire records use different size thresholds, geometries, cause taxonomies and revision policies. We keep each source's own definitions rather than flattening them into one tidy answer.
“No fire seen” is not “nobody looked”
A satellite that saw cloud, or passed at the wrong hour, did not observe an absence of fire. Treating the two as the same is a fast route to a confidently wrong model.
Weather drives it, and weather is uncertain
A wind shift is a fork in the forecast. Showing that spread honestly is more useful to a commander than a single confident answer would be.
Act IV
This is what the platform does
Five products, in plain language — each with the thing it explicitly does not do.
| Product | What it does | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Data foundation | Brings decades of scattered fire records into one place without erasing what makes them different. | Is not a complete or finished record of every fire. |
| Forecast engine | Runs many possible versions of a fire, not one. | Does not predict what will happen. |
| Command support | Puts the geometry, the trade-offs and the unknowns in front of commanders faster. | Does not decide, dispatch or command. |
| Public information | Shows official information from your government, clearly separated from our modelling. | Does not issue alerts or evacuation orders. |
| Drone and sensing | Supports agency-flown missions under their own aviation approvals. | Does not fly, route or deconflict aircraft. |
The briefing
How the platform actually works
A plain-language walk through the whole system: where the information comes from, how it is checked and compared, how a hot patch of ground becomes a ranked piece of work for a named person, and what stays with the responsible authority throughout.
Act VI
This is how you take part
Six ways in, ordered by how many people can actually do them. None of them makes you a responder, and nothing submitted here reaches an emergency service.
Residents and property owners
Reduce what your own property offers a fire. A printable checklist, with the first five feet around the structure emphasized.
Scientists and engineers
Test us. Public benchmarks, model cards and documented failure cases. This program publishes negative results, not only wins.
Agencies and jurisdictions
Partner on your terms. We integrate with your existing systems of record and never publish a decision.
Indigenous Nations and Tribes
An invitation to co-govern, not a request for data. Terms originate with partner Nations.
Data holders
Utilities, municipalities, land managers and camera-network operators, under formal agreement.
Everyone
Understand it. Learning to read an uncertainty band correctly is a genuine contribution to public safety.
Before you go
If you need to know what is happening right now
This page explains the platform. It does not carry live fire, smoke or evacuation information, and it is not an alerting service.
Official wildfire information
These are the authorities that publish wildfire information and issue alerts. Wildfire Ahead is not one of them. In an emergency, follow your responsible public authority.