Digital Forest Twins for AI-based Wildfire Assessment

Introduction

Wildfires have a devastating impact on the environment, infrastructure, animals, and human lives. The complex physical dynamics paired with their unpredictable development makes wildfires a dangerous natural phenomenon that is difficult to counteract.

Digital Twins Concept

Recently, digital twins have emerged as a concept that combines geometric modeling, image synthesis, and physical simulation with broad applications in predicting real-world processes. This proposal aims to develop digital twins for wildfires – 3D models of ecosystems coupled with physical simulations – and to build AI-based tools for wildfire assessment.

Implications for Firefighting Services

A wildfire twin with realistic physical simulations will have ground-breaking implications for firefighting services. They will be able to use my framework as part of their decision-making, resulting in an improved ability to combat wildfires, keep human lives safe, and protect the environment.

Advantages of Novel Digital Twin

In contrast to existing wildfire simulations, a novel digital twin will provide:

• Real-time simulations of wildfires
• Complex 3D representations of ecosystems

By relying on state-of-the-art computer graphics technology, a digital twin will support generating photorealistic images and videos of wildfires.

Accelerating AI-Based Solutions

Synthetically generated data with high visual fidelity will profoundly accelerate the development and adoption of AI-based solutions for managing wildfires, as it addresses the bottleneck of capturing and curating expensive real-world training datasets.

Impact on Scientific Investigation

A digital twin that supports fast and accurate simulations of wildfires will have a major impact on the analytical investigation conducted by the scientific community interested in understanding wildfires by accelerating the evaluation of hypotheses.

Virtual Training Environment

Additionally, I plan to use the digital twin as a RobotGym – a virtual training environment for autonomous agents.

Risks and Considerations

A risk of this proposal is that a digital twin may not attain the required degree of realism – in which case it is still possible to identify options for higher quality.