When we opted for this Prototype Sprint, we got to know that we would be having a new 4th member (Kenneth) in our team for the Sprint. Since the three of us (i.e Bhavesh, Devansu and Namrata) already knew each other ever since we joined the community, we decided to have a small icebreaker call with Kenneth 🤗
We did it a bit differently by hosting it in the Metaverse using AltSpaceVR 🤩We were hanging out in different worlds within AltSpace, playing fun games 🕹️ and we got to know each other 🤗, our interests, our favorite domain in Tech 😍, our hobbies. We realized that we had a mutual interest for Nature 🌲, and spending time in nature. We were also intrigued by the beautiful greenery of different worlds within the Metaverse and we got into a deep & interesting conversation about Nature, some of the nature trips we had made in the past, and some of the major problems like deforestation, Forest Fires, Global warming that were destroying the Mother Nature 😔
That’s when we realized that we could pick a problem from the Green Tech domain and develop a solution/prototype for it. Our mutual interest in Nature brought us together as a team 🔥 to build something that would contribute to solving a real-world problem 💯 as well as something that we would be proud of.
We researched some of the Problem statements within the Green Tech domain and tried to take some inspiration from some of the problem statements that the past Imagine Cup winners and some of the other teams had worked on.
After some heavy research, we realized that we hardly found any complete end-to-end solutions focusing on the problem of Forest Fires & deforestation.
Forest fires are generally caused due to Natural as well as Man-made factors:
- Natural causes - Many forest fires start from natural causes such as lightning which set trees on fire. High atmospheric temperatures and dryness (low humidity) also offer favorable circumstances for a fire to start.
- Man-made causes - Fire is caused when a source of fire like naked flame, cigarettes, electric spark or any source of ignition encounters inflammable material.
A look at some of the statistics that we came across while researching wildfires -
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About 4.7 million acres of forest cover were burned in 2019 while there were 8.8 million acres burned in 2018 due to Forest fires.
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Out of the total 7,12,249 square km of forest cover, 1,52,421 square km (21.40 %) is either highly or extremely fire prone. In 2021, India recorded about 21,487 forest fire incidents.
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In Philippines, 24KHa of land has burned so far in 2021. This total is low compared to the total for previous years going back to 2001.
Hence, we decided to focus on building a prototype during this Sprint that could help with making early Forest Fire predictions and possibly preventing a potential forest fire.
Initially, we were a bit confused whether we should focus on the De-forestation or the Forest Fire problem. To get some validation of the problem and whether it was feasible to work on something like this or not, we reached out to Microsoft Cloud Advocates within the Student Ambassador community to get some mentorship.
We received the required mentorship through a one-on-one session, thanks to the amazing Microsoft Cloud Advocacy team, and we decided to work on the problem of Forest Fires.
“A system to monitor Environmental conditions like weather, soil temperature, soil moisture, sunlight radiation of a region, make early predictions of a potential Forest Fire incident based on this data, send automated alerts and initiate procedures to mitigate a potential incident.”
We are focusing on three major problems for an end-to-end solution for Forest Fires:-
1. Monitoring and Detecting Forest Fire conditions
2. Early Prediction of Forest Fires
3. Preventing/Mitigating Forest Fire conditions
In the next document, we shall focus on the various Solutions that we identified based for the above problem statement.