Drone pilots hunting for underground hotspots in Scotland's Cairngorms National Park have found active fires burning beneath the soil three months after a major wildfire swept across the landscape in July. The initial blaze consumed about 3,300 hectares of land according to the Cairngorms National Park Authority. Pete Short, a thermal drone pilot, uses heat-sensing technology to locate smoldering areas invisible to the naked eye. During recent flights, Short found eight separate hotspots, each one marked for ground teams to dig down and extinguish with water.
"Without the thermal technology we would be totally blind to this," Short said.
The wildfire forced five experienced drone pilots to work together providing real-time aerial intelligence to firefighting agencies. Short described conditions during the active fire as "one of the most challenging environments" he had ever flown in, with multiple walls of flame, personnel, vehicles and helicopters operating simultaneously across the site.
Ben Jones, senior site manager for the RSPB at Abernethy, emphasized the value of precise hotspot location data. "We've got limited resources in terms of the number of people we have and we can't send everybody out everywhere all the time," Jones said. "So we really need to know where these specific hot spots are so that they can be as efficient as possible." Each subsurface hotspot carries the risk of reigniting into a larger fire, even as colder, wetter weather arrives.
Conservationists are now repurposing the drone technology for landscape recovery monitoring. Pete Short is programming drones to fly identical routes repeatedly using predetermined waypoints. Photographs and video captured from the same positions month after month and year after year will allow the Cairngorms National Park Authority to track ecological regeneration. Dr Sarah Henshall, head of conservation at the authority, said recovery timescales will vary dramatically. "Some of that will be incredibly quick, some of it will take years, decades, or even beyond our lifetime," she said. Early signs of life are visible, with green shoots, fungi, and small flowers already emerging through scorched forest floor areas.
The technology may also serve a prevention role. Short believes rapid drone surveillance above the tree canopy could prove critical in stopping future wildfires before they spread uncontrollably.