Platform briefing
Read as textNorth American wildfire intelligence
Takeaway
Every slide above, in order, in whichever reading level you chose. Each heading opens the slide it came from.
One platform that gathers every wildfire signal a continent produces, works out what it means, and puts it in front of the people who decide — without ever taking their decision away.
Satellites and cameras tell you a fire exists. This platform tells you what it means, for your ground, with the working shown.
Skip the jargon. Four things, and if you remember only these, you have the shape of it.
Gather everything, work out what it means, show the working, hand it to the people who decide.
Canada averages about 7,000 wildfires and 2.7 million hectares burned a year over 1994–2023. The 2026 season alone reached 5,248 fires and 4.49 million hectares by 31 August.
The variance is the point. A plan built for the average year fails in the year that matters.
Anyone can promise prediction. These are the four things that make wildfire prediction hard, and how the platform handles each one.
Teaching an audience to read uncertainty correctly is public-safety work in itself.
The wildfire technology field is strong, well funded and specialised. Each part of it does one thing very well. None of them owns the joins.
In February 2026 two of these companies partnered to wire two layers together. That is the market conceding where the value is.
These are the questions duty officers actually ask. Most of them have no single home, so a person assembles the answer by hand, under time pressure.
Each of these is a real workflow that a person currently does by hand, at three in the morning, in a bad week.
Governments have already funded the satellites, the weather models, the fire danger science and the historical records. Rebuilding any of that would be a waste of public money and would produce something worse.
The advantage is integration, speed, usability and cross-domain reasoning. Not recreating authoritative inputs.
Everything the platform does fits in this shape. The rest of this act is detail underneath it.
Collect, check, compare, work out, show. Everything else in this presentation sits underneath one of those five words.
The platform is not one big system. It is four deliberately separated zones with different rules, and a governance layer that spans all of them.
A public traffic surge cannot reach operations. A research result cannot reach operations without qualification. Neither can reach an aircraft.
This is the whole path. Click any stage to see what arrives, what leaves, which part of the system owns it and what rule it enforces.
Nothing that arrives is ever edited. Everything after it is a copy with its own history, so you can always get back to what was actually said.
The second column is the interesting one. A module that is not allowed to own something cannot quietly grow into it.
Ownership plus prohibition, enforced by build checks, is what keeps a support system from becoming a command system by accident.
A risk score with no working is a black box, and a black box does not get adopted by an agency. Every consequential figure opens into its inputs.
An agency adopts a number it can argue with. It does not adopt one it cannot see inside.
Each one exists because a person in a named role currently answers that question by hand. Click any capability for what goes in, what comes out, and what makes it different.
Twelve answers to twelve real questions, each one showing its working.
Most systems cannot tell you the difference. This one refuses to express a confident absence without first computing where it could actually see.
Coverage says a cell was looked at. Only a measured probability of detection turns that into 'we would have seen it'.
The same governed truth, delivered four ways — because a resident, a duty officer, a professor and a utility's operations lead need genuinely different things.
Two mobile apps as well: one for households with no account and no location tracking, one for responders that works fully offline.
Authority is per action. An aviation role cannot confirm an incident, and an incident commander cannot issue an evacuation. Pick a family to see what those people actually do.
Every route declares a permission and a purpose, and a build check fails when a route needs a permission that no role grants.
This is the slide that matters most to a government room. Each row names who does perform the action, and what in the build refuses to let the platform do it.
A boundary that is only written down erodes one reasonable feature at a time. These are checked on every build.
Participation, consent, knowledge, access, benefit and withdrawal are determined by the applicable Nation's or Tribe's own laws and representatives — and the platform is built so those terms can actually be enforced and reversed.
Indigenous knowledge is not presumed open, digitisable or model-training material. Consent is never inferred from public availability.
Drone procurement is a moving target and manufacturers come and go. The platform talks to aircraft through a port with a fail-closed registry, and no part of the domain names a vendor.
For a manufacturer, that means integration is bounded work against a published contract — not a bet on a partnership.
Vendors sell endurance. Endurance is the by-product. A conductor and a fibre running to the ground change which instruments can fly at all — and move the computer off the aircraft.
One qualification path, one model card, one evaluation — because the same model artefact runs at the incident and in the cloud.
Every figure here is derived from first principles with its assumptions stated, or taken from a cited vendor datasheet, or set by a regulation. Select any part to see the working.
Endurance stops being the constraint. Delivered power, wind, and regulatory status become the three that bind.
In Canada, the same aircraft on the same tether at the same height is either an obstacle or a remotely piloted aircraft, depending on whether a pilot is navigating it right now. The platform models that as state.
A repositioning command is refused unless the evidence for that regime is complete, and the refusal names the missing items.
Each one is a real gap in operational wildfire science, not a feature. This is the slide a professor reads twice.
The data that trains the models that make the platform valuable comes from the instrument the platform builds.
The station's argument is not that the hardware is cheap. A complete tethered system runs roughly $15,000 to $250,000 depending on capability. It is what an hour of continuous observation costs.
In the United States the public-safety relief reaches volunteer departments, which are roughly 65 percent of the firefighting workforce and largely cannot staff a certificated drone programme at all.
Each column is a real, capable product. Ratings are drawn from public sources and the dimensions are buying questions, not features we happen to have.
The named players are strong and mostly complementary. Each occupies one layer; the position is the seam between them plus the instrument.
Satellite detection feeds in. Camera networks feed in. Predictive analytics interoperate. Evacuation platforms receive. The platform is the connective tissue and the measurement layer.
Nothing here asks an agency to replace what works. It asks them to stop assembling the answer by hand.
Four audiences, four different next steps. All of them start with a working session on your own ground rather than a demonstration of ours.
Every one of these starts the same way: your data, your ground, your question.
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